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The Man of Power 

A SERIES OF STUDIES IN 
CHRISTIAN EFFICIENCY 



BY 



LYNN HAROLD HOUGH 




THE ABINGDON PRESS 
NEW YORK CINCINNATI 



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Copyright, 1916, by 
LYNN HAROLD HOUGH 



2) 1916 



©CI.A437302 






TO 

WILLIAM VALENTINE KELLEY 

A MASTER MAN OF LETTERS AND A 
CONSUMMATE FRIEND 

THIS VOLUME IS 
AFFECTIONATELY INSCRIBED 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

I. Inner Efficiency 9 

II. Efficiency in Expression. ... 20 

III. The Efficient Mind 29 

IV* The Efficient Conscience. ... 39 

V. Emotional Efficiency 50 

VI. The Efficient Will 62 

VII. Spiritual Efficiency 73 

VIII. Social Efficiency 84 

IX. Professional Efficiency 95 

X. The Efficient Churchman... . 106 

XI. The Efficient Citizen 118 

XII. Complete Efficiency 129 



INNER EFFICIENCY 

It is a dangerous thing for a word to 
become popular. The experience is likely 
to turn its head. Over and over again a 
steady and capable word which has had 
a long and useful career has come into 
sudden notoriety. The experience has 
been quite too much for it. Flaunted in 
the headlines of yellow journals, flung 
from the tongues of sensational speakers, . 
carelessly tossed from lip to lip by the 
thoughtless crowd, it has degenerated un- 
til it has quite lost its character. Popular 
words are likely to get into bad company, 
and in the end this will be their undoing. 

The word ''efficiency'' is just now meet- 
ing all the dangers of a wide popularity. 
Whether it will be strong enough to stand 
the strain remains to be seen. There are 
times when it appears a bit the worse for 

9 



THE MAN OF POWER 

wear, and it is occasionally seen in ques- 
tionable if not in bad company. So at 
the very beginning of this series of 
studies we will come to an understanding 
with the word "efficiency." It is to be- 
have with dignity and propriety for the 
present, at least; and it is to be used as 
a watchword to express something deeper 
than commercial agility and the nervous 
energy which brings quick monetary re- 
turns. 

There is a kind of efficiency which is 
the equivalent of superficiality. It is so 
busy acting that it has no time to think; 
or, if it does think, it catches all its 
thoughts, as the baseball enthusiasts 
would say, "on the fly." It purchases 
sixty minutes of smartness at the expense 
of an hour of brooding thought. It is 
sharp and alert, but never deep. It con- 
stantly takes snapshots, but does not un- 
derstand the value of time exposure. It 
can finance a business, run a factory, give 
publicity to an enterprise, put a church 
on a new and practical basis, resuscitate 

lO 



INNER EFFICIENCY 

a dying newspaper, or resurrect a dead 
business. It is quick, confident, and suc- 
cessful. But for all this it fails of the 
largest results. It has never fathomed 
the price you must pay for permanence. 
It' has never understood that sometimes 
you must fail in order to succeed. It does 
not know the value of self-sacrifice. It 
has never estimated the significance of all 
the quiet qualities which go to build up 
character, but do not show well in the 
spectacular view of a purely external sue- 
cess. It lacks maturity. It is acid and 
without mellowness. It is crated and sold 
before it has ripened. It is a powerful 
expression of energy in a part of life, but 
life itself is larger and deeper than all its 
activities would ever suggest. 

Now, the first thing we want to say is 
that efficiency must mean something 
deeper and finer than this if we are 
going to make friends with it. The effi- 
cient Christian must be more than a quick 
and vigorous man of affairs. 

So we will take this word "efficiency** 
II 



THE MAN OF POWER 

to a place which may well sober it and 
cause all raw and frivolous qualities to be 
quickly dropped. We will go to the 
source of the deep and abiding things — 
to the seat of the tragedy and the glory 
of the world. We will go with this word 
^'efficiency" to the inner life. 

If a man is ever to be adequate, if he 
is to be possessed of lasting strength, the 
source of it must be the life within. 
While there is anarchy here, there can be 
no real poise anywhere else. If there is 
lawlessness within, the output can never 
be that of a well-ordered life. 

There are multitudes of men and 
women who fail and do not know why 
they fail. The more they think about it, 
the more confused they become. They 
know that they have sound bodies, ready 
to take their share of the world's physical 
wear and tear. They know that they have 
good minds, quick to seize the meaning 
of a situation and ready to grapple with 
hard questions. They know that they 
have wills which they can apply to long, 

12 



INNER EFFICIENCY 

hard tasks. It seems as if their equipment 
is all that reasonable men and women can 
ask. Yet the days are filled with a sense 
of unrequited effort and the evenings 
settle heavy with the discouragement of 
unavailing toil. 

What is the matter with these people? 
We must look within. There we find the 
worm which destroys the fruit. There 
we find the unrest which weakens all the 
output of the life. The forces which play 
beneath the surface are fighting each 
other, and this inner antagonism is the 
source of failure. Many a strong man is 
simply worn out by an inner restlessness. 
The invisible battles cause nervous pros- 
tration and fill the sanitariums with their 
patients. When most of a man's vitality 
is used to put down a riot in his soul, he 
is at a great disadvantage in all his 
thought and work and in all his relations 
with other men. The very basis of all 
true efficiency is to be found, then, in the 
inner life. It must be calmed and steadied 
and mastered if the outer life is to be one 
13 



THE MAN OF POWER 

of power. The conquest of the Hfe with- 
in is the basis of all other human achieve- 
ment. 

How are men and women to attain this 
mastery of their own hearts? How are 
they to become in this deep sense ^'cap- 
tains of their own souls"? The answer 
to this question at once justifies the join- 
ing of the words '^Christian" and ^'Effi- 
ciency" in this series of studies. There 
is one power which has completely vindi- 
cated itself historically by bringing about 
harmony in the inner life. There is one 
method of inner repose which has been 
found successful by multitudes of men 
and women. A Christian experience is 
the great unifier of the forces of the soul. 
A sense of "peace with God through our 
Lord Jesus Christ" is the perpetual pro- 
ducer of that inner repose where all the 
clenched antagonisms of the spirit vanish 
in a wonderful peace. It is the Saviour 
who can look out on the tempest which 
breaks over our souls and still its angry 
billows. It is the personal acceptance of 
14 



INNER EFFICIENCY 

the great sacrifice on the cross which leads 
to peace within. 

Here is a man whose heart has been 
full of jarring discord. A hundred mo- 
tives have struggled for supremacy in his 
mind. Turbulent desires have fought like 
wild beasts on the arena of his inner life. 
Often the best has been worsted. Often 
the worst has triumphed. Added to the 
confusion of battle, there is the stinging 
memory of many a failure. The man is 
handicapped in all the undertakings of 
his life. He is crippled at the very be- 
ginning of his tasks. 

This man makes a great discovery. He 
learns the personal meaning of the Chris- 
tian life. He discovers the adequacy of 
the cross. In a decisive act of faith he 
accepts the Saviour as his Saviour. He 
trusts everything in his past and his pres- 
ent and his future to the care of the Son 
of God, who died for him. Like Chris- 
tian in Pilgrim's Progress, he feels a 
great burden roll away. He is saved from 
the gnawing sense of his own failure as 

15 



THE MAN OF POWER 

he looks away to the adequacy of Christ. 
He is saved from the clamorous mutiny 
of his own desires as a deep loyalty to 
Christ takes the place of command in his 
soul. All the noisy voices of unrest are 
silenced. There is quiet within. 

This inner tranquillity makes a new 
man of him. He goes forth with elastic 
step, and shining eye, and unwearied 
brain to his daily tasks. He applies the 
full power of an unwasted energy to the 
work of life. 

The efficient Christian, then, is first of 
all a man whose inner life has found unity 
and harmony through the grace of Christ. 
All the vast machinery of his personality 
has been organized about the one great 
motive of obedient trust in the Saviour. 
The recesses of his life have been touched 
by a power which is to move out through 
all his activity. But this is not all. The 
Christian has more than the efficiency 
which comes from one commanding pur- 
pose controlling the varied forces within. 
There is not only peace; there is also 
i6 



INNER EFFICIENCY 

power. There is not only unity ; there is 
also inspiration. 

A life can never come to its best until 
it is kindled into flame. Cold correctness 
can never rival warm enthusiasm. A 
Christian experience has a kindling 
quality. It gives to the inner life zest 
and eagerness and spontaneity. It is a 
source of creative energy. It is full of 
glad surprises. The difference between a 
faithful man and an efficient man often 
lies just here. The one is dependable, but 
commonplace ; the other is dependable and 
also full of expedients, fertile in sugges- 
tions, overflowing with ideas. Nothing 
else will take the place of a creative energy 
at work in a man's life. This a Christian 
experience when it is in full possession 
of the mind and heart supplies. 

There is one other characteristic of 
inner efficiency. That is permanence. It 
is not a passing mood of self-control. It 
is not a transient glow of enthusiasm. 
It is a perennial fountain of peace and 
inspiration. It enriches the life and 
17 



THE MAN OF POWER 

makes it fertile through the years. It 
steadies youth. It preserves the freshness 
and joy of Hfe for maturity. It brings 
a sunset splendor to old age. It is a foun- 
tain springing up unto everlasting life. 

The living Christ secures this perma- 
nence. Because he is the source of the new- 
experience and its continual dispenser, it 
can be depended on to last forever. The 
Christian's peace may be unfathomably 
deep; his enthusiasms may be full of 
triumphant energy, his experience a never 
failing source of power, because it is all 
based on the character of God; and God 
is perfect life and perfect love. The All 
Efficient delights to create efficiency in the 
children of men. 

Beside such lives the achievements of 
mere haste and nervous alertness seem 
paltry. The glamour of the external fades 
as a man comes to understand the hidden 
life. The reign of flashing color and of 
loud noise is over when the verities of the 
life within are understood. The efficient 
Christian learns first of all that the unseen 
i8 



INNER EFFICIENCY 

things are eternal. He also learns that 
the unseen may control the seen, and that 
the eternal may express itself in the tem- 
poral. Inner efficiency is to become outer 
efficiency and make its own place in the 
world. Out of the heart are the issues of 
life, and from a personality characterized 
by inner harmony notable issues will 
come. The man in whose life the inner 
problem has been solved can look out on 
the activities of men and cry, like the 
Count of Monte Cristo, 'The world is 
mine !'' 



19 



II 

EFFICIENCY IN EXPRESSION 

There is such a thing as inner har- 
mony and outer chaos. A man's heart 
may be right and his head wrong. A 
man's purposes may be good and his 
methods bad. A man's soul may be a 
sanctuary and his deeds form an ineffec- 
tive and confusing mass. Some men with 
the best intentions in the world have what 
almost amounts to a genius for saying 
and doing the wrong thing. 

The phenomenon of the disagreeable 
saint is a conspicuous illustration of the 
difference which may exist between a 
man's inner life and its expression. The 
wonder and the beauty of the Lord have 
lighted the heights of this man's soul. 
Everybody respects him. Everybody be- 
lieves in him. The integrity of his spir- 
itual life no one would dispute. But for 
all that he is a thorn in the flesh of the 

ao 



EFFICIENCY IN EXPRESSION 

church. His methods of expression are 
continually unfortunate. He is an uncon- 
scious producer of discord. You are sure 
of his salvation, but you have grave 
doubts as to w^hether he will ever help 
anybody else to be saved. There is in his 
own life the tragedy of a practical failure. 
He is good, but impossible. 

Then there is the man who has given 
his heart to God, but who has never given 
his nerves to God. And beside him is the 
man affected with a strange paralysis of 
the rnuscles as far as Christian activity is 
concerned. There is a failure in connec- 
tion between the power house of the soul 
and all the moving wheels of the life's 
activity. 

Aside from the accentuated cases, in- 
stances of which come quickly to all of 
our minds, there is the incongruity every 
man has felt who knows the peace of a 
great trust in Christ. This is the contrast 
between the fire in his heart and the 
warmth he gives out. It is the difference 
between the light in his soul and the illu- 

21 



THE MAN OF POWER 

mination he gives to men about him. His 
deeds simply do not correspond to his in- 
spiration. 

Now, what are the practical methods 
by which a man may more efficiently coin 
the Christian meaning of his life into 
words and deeds ? How may a man lessen 
the difference between the warmth of his 
heart and the effectiveness of his hand? 

At the outset of our endeavor to reply 
to these questions we must remind our- 
selves that sometimes the difficulty is in 
the heart, after all. The life within has 
some hidden source of unrest, and this 
makes all the activity less potent than it 
might be. In such cases the remedy, as 
well as the cause, must have to do with 
the life within. A firmer acceptance of 
Christ, a more final commitment in per- 
sonal trust, a deeper consecration must 
change the situation in the man's soul. 
But granted that all is well in the sanc- 
tuary of a man's life, granted that the 
peace of God dwells securely in his heart, 
how is his activity to be made more effi- 

22 



EFFICIENCY IN EXPRESSION 

cient? At this point there is a place for 
much personal study and careful work- 
ing out of method. No man can study 
his way into a Christian experience; but 
many a man by study can find the best 
way to give expression to his Christian 
devotion. 

The matter of speech is an outstanding 
illustration. Here is a man who has 
plenty of love in his heart, but no words 
on his tongue. A very obvious course 
for this man is to become a reader. Books 
are somewhat rich in the possession of 
words, and a man who reads much will 
obtain a vocabulary. He is constantly 
becoming better acquainted with words 
as he reads. He comes at last to have 
very free and familiar relations with 
them. The day may come when he can 
do with them what he will. Two varieties 
of reading will be of special importance 
for the man who desires efficiency in 
verbal expression as a Christian. First, 
there is all that matter in books and 
papers which deals with living issues and 

23 



THE MAN OF POWER 

actual human experience. The words and 
phrases have caught the contagion of 
vitality and a man will learn much from 
them. Then there are those books in 
which the deep things of the soul have 
been spoken out. There is a language of 
the spirit, and a Christian needs to learn 
to speak in this tongue. The vernacular 
of the New Jerusalem, like the city itself, 
is let down out of heaven, and the great 
books of devotion are full of it. Now, 
these two types of reading — in vivid 
human literature and in rich devotional 
literature — will play into each other and 
give a man words which are; strong and 
firm, noble and full of energy in which 
to speak of the deep things of men and 
the deep things of God. If a man were 
to do all this reading as a substitute for 
a personal spiritual life, the result would 
be the dreariest verbal cant and make- 
believe, but if he uses this means to secure 
an adequate expression of a deep and 
abiding consciousness of God in his own 
soul, there will come a time when he can 
24 



EFFICIENCY IN EXPRESSION 

speak of noble things with noble words, 
and of Hving things in words which are 
also alive. 

When it comes to the matter of deeds, 
still further possibilities of growth in the 
grace of expression emerge. Much can 
be learned from the most capable Chris- 
tians a man knows. Fortunately, right 
habits and methods have a contagion all 
of their own. Men can gain from those 
whose Christian effectiveness they admire 
the most, a double portion of their own 
power. At this point a man must be 
guarded from mechanical imitation. 
There is a difference between a photo- 
graph and an artist's sketch. The one is 
a mechanical likeness, the other catches 
the soul of the scene. Men are to learn 
from their friends with an artist's brush 
and not with the snap of a camera. 

Not only the men whose hands we have 
touched and the men whose eyes we have 
seen flash, but a great multitude of other 
men can teach us many a secret of efficient 
activity. Life is an experiment station, 
25 



THE MAN OF POWER 

and Christian biography is the account of 
no end of experiments. The study of 
these records is an important part of our 
Christian education. Sometimes a life 
teaches us how a thing ought not to be 
done. From the tale of other men's fail- 
ures we may learn the way of success. 
Sometimes a fine method must be changed 
and adapted to our circumstances and to 
our time, but the record of how this man 
did the thing really suggests to us how 
we may do it. The hoarded experience 
of nineteen hundred years is at our dis-' 
posal, as we approach the art of living in 
this great human school. 

The Bible is not only the gateway to 
the peace of the heart, but it is the gate- 
way to the service of the hand. It is full 
of tales of failure, to be sure, but it also 
has many a narrative of efficient and suc- 
cessful expression of the noblest purposes. 
The principles by which the joy of the 
heart may become the skill of the hand 
are scattered all through the Bible, and 
he who thinks before he runs may read 
26 



EFFICIENCY IN EXPRESSION 

and then apply these principles to his own 
life. 

The great portrait of the life of Jesus 
is full of practical instruction. He is the 
world's Saviour. He is also the world's 
Teacher in the art of life. The man 
whose mind is full of the knowledge of 
Jesus and whose heart is being renewed 
constantly by the Spirit of Jesus will find 
new powers of expression in word and 
deed opening to him all the while. 

Then this thing must be said. A man's 
own life is an experiment station. If he 
is to learn from others, he is to learn 
from himself. No life is adequate which 
does not express the individual quality of 
the man. The peace of God is one 
triumphant experience, but it is to be ex- 
pressed through all the wonderful variety 
of manifold lives. A man is to listen to 
the voice of his own nature. Through 
its very quality he will give best expres- 
sion to his devotion to God. What comes 
through friendships, and books, and the 
Bible is to be expressed with the flavor 

27 



THE MAN OF POWER 

of a man's own life. Without this it may 
be earnest, but it will never have the 
utmost efficiency or power. 

Last of all we must remember this : At 
its best the life of efficient expression is 
a spontaneous life. After all study of 
methods and people and books, after all 
long and painful discipline, the day comes 
when these things sink below the level of 
the conscious endeavor and a man in- 
stinctively gathers up the best which has 
come from all these things and pours it 
forth in words and deeds. The time of 
unconscious zestful activity is the time of 
greatest potency in the life of a Christian 
man. 



28 



Ill 

THE EFFICIENT MIND 

The mind may be used as an instru- 
ment for the finding of the truth. It may 
also be used as an instrument for avoid- 
ing the truth. The habit of seeing the 
thing not as it is, but "as the eye Hkes the 
look/' is very common. The habit of 
making the worst appear the better reason 
is the particular vice of the mind. We see 
many things with the eyes of our desires, 
and such sight is not dependable. 

We now know that photography may 
be made a means of deception. A camera 
may be so placed and a picture so de- 
veloped that it does not tell the truth at 
all. The mind is like a camera, and the 
pictures it takes are often manipulated by 
the photographer. The first mental virtue 
is the taking of honest pictures. With- 
out this virtue a man may have a skillful 
mind. It may be capable of notable 
29 



THE MAN OF POWER 

achievements and it may be kept moving 
with every part in a state of intense and 
potent activity. But a fatal flaw moves 
through all these mental processes. The 
man who uses his mind to deceive others 
will find at last that it deceives him as 
well. It plays the very tricks upon its 
master that he plays upon the world, 
and so at last the man becomes the victim 
of his own dishonesty. The foes who 
overcome him are of his own mental 
household. 

The first quality of an efficient mind, 
then, is honesty of purpose. Mental 
virtue is on the side of efficiency. An 
evil mind cannot be the most capable sort 
of mind. The breakdown of many a plot 
and many a conspiracy has come just at 
this point. There is always danger of 
mental shipwreck for a bad cause. It 
overreaches or underreaches. It makes 
a false estimate. Its inner falseness has 
made it incapable of being sure at the 
very points where assurance is necessary 
for success. 

30 



THE EFFICIENT MIND 

The next characteristic of mental effi- 
ciency is a full mind. Something must 
be brought out of the past to every ade- 
quate mental endeavor. A man cannot 
do the best work on an empty mind. 
Thought and even perception are largely 
a matter of comparison. What old ideas 
are the background of this new thought? 
What old truths are ready to examine 
and test this new claimant ? What knowl- 
edge of men and things and history is 
ready to be brought to bear on this new 
problem? If the knowledge is wisely 
classified, we may say that the fuller the 
mind the more capable it is of receiving 
and placing and using new truth. It is 
the empty mind which is disconcerted 
when a new truth knocks at its door. 

Then the efficient mind must be a disci- 
plined mind. The mind never does its 
best work on its maiden voyage. Study 
and experience and work must have tested 
and trained the instruments of perception 
and thought until they become fine imple- 
ments. Again and again the cutting 

31 



THE MAN OF POWER 

blades of the mind must be sharpened if 
they are to keep their edge. With these 
things given we may say that mental effi- 
ciency consists in the habit of a close look, 
a wide look, a far look, and a high look. 
Some men have an eye for large rela- 
tions, but see only a blur when it comes 
to a near view. Such men are never capa- 
ble of fine work either with the mind 
or with the hand. The fine work of the 
world requires the close look. The micro- 
scope is the great symbol of the need of 
viewing the smallest and nearest things 
accurately. There is a universe which 
is beyond us because it is too vast. There 
is another universe which is beyond us 
because it is too small. The microscope 
is a means by which we try to pry our way 
into the region of infinitely small things. 
Its services to science illustrate the impor- 
tance of the close look. The human eye 
itself, however, is capable of much finer 
work than most of us ever require of it. 
And the eye of the mind has tremendous 
possibilities of cultivation in minute obser- 

32 



THE EFFICIENT MIND 

vation. The attentive eye is the eye which 
is capable of most in this regard. A man 
does not see all that is reflected on his 
optics. He sees just as much as he looks 
at, and he looks at just that to which he 
is paying attention. The thing seen by 
the close look may change the course of 
a life, or a city, or an empire. No mind 
is really efficient without it. 

There are dangers as well as advan- 
tages, however, in the microscopic eye. It 
may become so much occupied with little 
things that it does not see big things. It 
may fix its attention on some unimportant 
detail while the significance of the whole 
passes by unnoticed. So the close look 
needs to be supplemented by the wide 
look. The close look sees things. The 
wide look sees relations. The close look 
is concentrated and intense. The wide 
look is expansive and takes in large 
ranges. The one produces skill within 
narrow limits. The other produces large- 
ness and liberaHty of view. 

Mental hospitahty is an essential 
33 



THE MAN OF POWER 

characteristic of a growing life. The 
mind which is always living with the 
same facts and thoughts becomes dull and 
stale. There is nothing so refreshing as 
to have a new thought, or a fact pre- 
viously unwelcomed, come into the house 
of the mind. The mind which is like a 
great newspaper, with many reporters 
coming and going all the while, is saved 
from provinciality and given a genuine 
awareness about the world and about life. 
The wide look is characteristic of this 
type of mind. It is all the while enlarg- 
ing the circle of its vision. It is reaching 
out and becoming the master of new 
truths and new experiences. Everything 
that happens is of concern to it. Every- 
thing that can be thought is within the 
range of its interest. The wide look is 
the method of the versatile man. When 
the microscopic eye and the wide-ranging 
eye are found in one man, you have a 
combination of peculiar strength. He is 
intense without being narrow. He is 
broad without being superficial. It is 
34 



THE EFFICIENT MIND 

easier, however, to be broad than to be 
prophetic. It is easier to be versatile than 
to be foresighted. Many a man is inter- 
ested in numerous things who has no ade- 
quate sense of their consequences. He 
looks around, but he does not look ahead. 
So we come to the need of the far look. 

The man whose eye is on the future 
has some peculiar mental advantages. He 
learns to think in the terms of the onward 
movement of life. He is not standing 
on a mountain and looking over a wide- 
spreading scene. He is standing in a boat 
which moves down a great river. The 
movement of the boat and the movement 
of the stream occupy him. There is a 
destination far down the stream, and 
toward that he bends his eyes. 

If a man has nothing but the far look, 
he becomes a dreamer. He ignores the 
significance of the present. He dwells in 
days to come. The visionary is a man 
with nothing but a future. The man of 
vision builds his future securely upon the 
foundations of the past. The far look 
35 



THE MAN OF POWER 

has been the characteristic of the poets 
and seers of the world. They have been 
the priests of faith and the votaries of 
hope. The far look has also been the 
characteristic of astute and busy men of 
affairs who have forecast the course of 
currents in the world of trade. It has 
been the guide of statesmen who have 
labored for a future empire; which their 
powerful eyes foresaw. When the man 
of the close look and the wide look is 
also a man of far look, when concentra- 
tion and breadth unite with vision, the 
mental activity of a man has advanced 
to a new stage of adequacy and power. 

One more step we must take in the dis- 
cussion of the efficient mind. The man 
who would see life steadily and see it 
whole must also have the high look. No 
view of life is complete without the up- 
ward gaze. The irreverent mind is never 
the most capable mind, and the look above 
gives the mind wings for many a great 
flight. The vision of God and of great 
realities of the spirit forms a necessary 

36 



THE EFFICIENT MIND 

part of a complete and noble mental 
activity. The mind which has no window 
open toward the heavenly Jerusalem 
misses some of the most important facts 
of life. The hills are yet full of the 
chariots of God and the horsemen there- 
of, but without the high look we never 
see them. 

The man who comes to all the taxing 
demands of his everyday life with the 
glow of the hour of vision upon his face 
comes with a new practical power to the 
work of the day. The upward gaze 
which has seen the living Christ, Lord 
and Master of men, and from that great 
experience comes to the labor of the 
world, brings a spiritual inspiration and 
a mental quickening of the utmost practi- 
cal value. The man who has only the 
upward look is the votary of a vague and 
illusive mysticism. The man who adds 
this to the intense scrutiny of the near, 
the hospitable gaze upon the diversified 
facts of life, and the careful far gaze into 
the future, is a man of both spiritual 

37 



THE MAN OF POWER 

vision and practical power. The man 
who adds a noble mysticism to a close 
sense of hfe's present values; the man of 
the close look and the wide look, and the 
far look and the high look, is the com- 
pletest man of all. He is the actual pos- 
sessor of an efficient mind. 



38 



IV 
THE EFFICIENT CONSCIENCE 

Very strange things happen in the 
moral Hfe of men. The lover of para- 
doxes finds plenty of them here. To talk 
accurately about men's ethical experiences 
is to be driven into epigrams. More than 
that, the subject seems to bristle with 
contradictions, and you have no sooner 
made an affirmation with one breath than 
you are likely to have to state what seems 
very like its opposite with the next. In 
a realm where most of all we would like 
to deal with diagrams of mathematical 
correctness and photographs which show 
the truth in stable and simple lines, we 
find that we are dealing with kaleido- 
scopes and with moving pictures. 

Let us think for a moment of some of 

the anomalies which lie on the surface 

of the subject. Here are the charming 

people who seem to have no battles at all 

39 



THE MAN OF POWER 

in the region of morals. They are like 
bright-winged butterflies. We would 
never dream of calling them earnest, but 
the sun does flash back alluringly beauti- 
ful colors as it falls upon their wings. 
Here are the people, like Donatelo in 
Hawthorne's Marble Faun, who have 
never had a moral awakening, but who 
seem to live in a fair and radiant world 
which the moralists may well envy. 
Then there are the men and women of 
spasmodic morals. They have attacks of 
earnestness. They seem to live in a mias- 
mic country and are subject to ethical 
chills and fever. You can scarcely rid 
yourself of the suspicion that with these 
people earnestness has taken the form of 
a disease rather than of a normal life. 
They resemble that other group charac- 
terized by nervous conscientiousness. 
They have morals on the nerves. There 
is many an explosion of weary nerve 
centers, but you scarcely are able to feel 
that conscience has a nobly commanding 
place in the life. Then we all know peo- 
40 



THE EFFICIENT CONSCIENCE 

pie who have made conscience into a 
logical machine. There is a mechanical 
rigidity about the verbal syllogisms which 
they utter. Morality has become a matter 
which resembles a chemical formula. It 
all suggests a stuffy apothecary shop, and 
not the open air and largeness and fuUv- 
ness of life. The people who are lost 
in ethical details represent another type. 
They have great convictions about small 
things. They could give you a code of 
morals about a paper of pins, but you 
might need to watch them in a larger 
commercial transaction. They are so 
busy with a moral microscope that they 
are in danger of missing the great issues 
of life. There are people whose ethical 
system has crystallized into certain rules 
of propriety. With cold dignity they ob- 
serve these dictums and they never seem 
to feel that there is anything of moral 
significance beyond them. The fanatics 
are another class. They represent morals 
growing wild. They have plenty of ethi- 
cal passion, but very little ethical discern- 
41 



THE MAN OF POWER 

ment. They have the spirit of martyrs, 
but their moral perspective is all awry. 

All this involves confusion enough. 
But there is more to follow. We may put 
the blame for much of this on human 
vagary and misunderstanding, but the 
more we study the moral process in great 
typical men and experiences, the more we 
are forced to the conclusion that there is 
a strange dilemma at the very center of 
it. The majesty of the moral must takes 
possession of a man. It commands him 
to go forth as its servant. He listens to 
the voice and goes forth to obey its be- 
hest. He expects to find peace and con- 
tentment in the service of his conscience, 
but he finds no such thing. The harder 
he tries, the more dissatisfied he becomes. 
The moral demand covers so many items. 
His ethical vision so constantly expands. 
His sense of duty constantly outruns his 
performance. It is literally impossible 
for any man to live in such a fashion 
that he is sure he; has satisfied all his 
moral obligations. If the ethical passion 
42 



THE EFFICIENT CONSCIENCE 

grows and grows, a man will at last stare 
moral despair in the face. 

This, then, is the great dilemma. We 
are so made that we must obey the moral 
voice if we would avoid ethical ship- 
wreck. We are so made that when we 
try to obey it completely we simply can- 
not do it. The strange moral judgments 
and methods of men are most of them 
related in one fashion or another to this 
bewildering dilemma. 

When we come to analyze clearly the 
psychological situation which produces 
this dilemma, we make some very signifi- 
cant discoveries. The first may be ex- 
pressed in this way : You can never make 
friends with a network of laws. The 
voice of conscience lifts itself in the life 
of a man as the voice of the moral law, 
of a whole system of moral laws. They 
are absolute and they demand implicit 
obedience. They can deal only with 
deeds. They can never take intentions 
into account. They can judge only what 
a man does. They cannot be guided by 
43 



THE MAN OF POWER 

what a man tries to do. They demand 
what a man can never accomplish, yet 
they cannot treat him on the basis of his 
heroic attempt to obey their behests. 
While conscience is the voice of the ab- 
stract law of righteousness, it cannot be 
the friend of finite creatures. If there is 
to be any hope of peace for man, he must 
deal with a moral authority which he 
finds in a person and not in abstract law. 
The second discovery we make as we 
scrutinize man's despairing endeavors to 
satisfy the demands of the moral law is 
that his whole endeavor has a purpose 
and an emphasis which foredoom him to 
failure. What is he really trying to do ? 
He is trying to earn peace. He is trying 
to live in such a fashion that at the close 
of the day he can say, ''This day I have 
kept the moral law!'' The emphasis is 
on himself, his achievement, his compla- 
cency, his peace. There is a false note 
struck in the very purpose of the moral 
struggler. It isolates him on an elevation 
-of selfish endeavor which, itself, is sure 
44 



THE EFFICIENT CONSCIENCE 

to produce unrest. The peace of life is: 
found not in a man's own achievement. 
The way of trust is the way of content. 
The attempt to achieve peace is doomed 
to everlasting failure. The willingness 
to receive peace as a gift from One we 
trust opens the door to inner serenity. 

The truth is a man was never meant 
to satisfy his moral ideal. He was to try 
to satisfy it and fail in order that he 
might be driven to God for help. Con- 
science is a schoolmaster to lead men to 
Christ. When a man sees that he cannot 
obey the moral voice alone, he is driven 
to the great Helper. He stops depending 
upon himself and begins to depend on 
what Christ can do for him. He gives 
up carrying his load alone when he meets 
the world's great Burden-bearer. Con- 
science has done its preliminary work 
when it has made a man so perfectly dis- 
contented and miserable with his own 
failure and his own moral incapacity that 
it leads him to the place where he feels 
the need of a Saviour and is ready to* 

45 



THE MAN OF POWER 

accept his mighty ministry of deliverance 
and support. In the first period of a 
man's experience and struggle an effi- 
cient conscience, then, is one which makes 
him discontented. It gives him a stand- 
ard he can never reach, yet drives him 
on to the attempt. In all the torturing 
unrest of the experience it is deepening 
his life and preparing him for the great 
deliverance and the great peace which is 
the gift of God. This was the moral ex- 
perience of Paul, of Luther, and of Wes- 
ley. 

Is this all there is to the work of the 
conscience? Having led a man to the 
door of the temple, does it remain with- 
out, while he enters the sanctuary ? Hav- 
ing been a schoolmaster to lead him to 
Christ, is its work completed and may it 
be excused from further activity? Does 
conscience perform its full work in lead- 
ing men to accept the Saviour, or is there 
such a thing as a Christian conscience ? 

In the reply to this question we peer 
still deeper into the essential meaning 

46 



THE EFFICIENT CONSCIENCE 

of the moral process. When a man be- 
comes a Christian the Saviour himself 
becomes his moral authority. The ques- 
tion now is not, *'What would an abstract 
and absolute law of righteousness have 
me do?'' The question is, ''What would 
my Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ have 
me do?" Conscience has ceased to be the 
voice of a law. It has become the voice 
of a person. 

An important point of strategy is that 
a person can understand what we attempt 
as well as what we accomplish, can value 
our purpose as well as our deeds. Our 
personal life can be appraised and judged 
by an Infinite Person. Only his voice 
can speak with full consciousness of the 
meaning of all our struggle and experi- 
ence. 

But our own new emphasis and our 
own new purpose as Christians have also 
revolutionized our moral situation. After 
we have accepted the Saviour we are not 
trying to earn peace. We are trusting 
in him for peace. We are not trying to 

47 



THE MAN OF POWER 

achieve salvation. He has achieved it 
for us. We follow his voice not as slaves 
driven by the lash, but as sons gladly 
obedient. We obey not to earn anything, 
but as the glad tribute of loving hearts 
and lives. In him the moral imperative 
has beea transfigured by love. After we 
have accepted him the moral voice keeps 
its power, but it is not accompanied by 
the moral lash which drives slaves to a 
dungeon. 

The man who enthrones the will of 
Christ and the Spirit of Christ in his life 
has what from a Christian standpoint 
may be called "an efficient conscience." 
He has been delivered from the old 
legalism, he has been delivered from 
chains and dungeon, but he has not been 
set free from moral passion. The most 
potent, as well as the most loved, voice 
in all the world to him is the voice of 
Christ. That voice thrills with moral 
passion and with moral power. Christ 
himself is the conscience of the Chris- 
tian. At last conscience is his friend. 

48 



THE EFFICIENT CONSCIENCE 

Christian ethics, then, has to do with 
the enthronement of Christ and the doing 
of his will among all men. "If you love 
me, keep my commandments," is the 
fundamental word in the morals of the 
Christian. The matter of infusing a life 
in this modern world with the spirit of 
Christ involves many a new situation and 
many a new problem. The matter of apply- 
ing his will to all the complex situations 
of our twentieth-century life is a task 
demanding clear brains as well as loyal 
hearts and ready hands. The Christian 
man approaches this task, his heart full 
of love and free from all the weight of 
an inner unrest. His personal experience 
of the love of Christ and his great salva- 
tion gives him courage and hope and in- 
sight. The very moment when, with 
rejoicing heart, he felt that his sins were 
forgiven, the moral processes of a Chris- 
tian set to work in him. His constant 
method of moral renewal is to open his 
mind and heart to the passion and pur- 
pose of his Saviour and Lord. 

49 



V 

EMOTIONAL EFFICIENCY 

George Macdonald has a quaint 
character in one of his novels who was 
troubled because she thought she had no 
feelings. The problem with most people 
is quite different from the one which per- 
plexed this woman. They have plenty 
of feelings, but they do not always have 
the right feelings, and very often some 
emotion takes the bit in its mouth and 
starts off on a gallop, heedless of the tug 
of the driver's hands upon the reins. 

The emotions are really a very mu- 
tinous crew, and the captain is sometimes 
at his wits' end as to how to deal with 
them. They appear like sudden whirling 
tempests, do their destructive work, and 
then vanish. You cannot capture and 
imprison a fierce wind, and there are 
times when to speak of the discipline of 
50 



EMOTIONAL EFFICIENCY 

the emotions seems like talking of the 
discipline of a cyclone. 

The more we think of it, the more it 
seems clear that our emotions like to play 
with us. They come when they are not 
wanted. They refuse to come when we 
particularly desire them. If a man makes 
up his mind that he ought to feel in a 
certain way about some matter, and then 
tries to feel just that way, he will have 
an interesting psychological experience. 
The feeling simply does not come. There 
is no way to pump it up from beneath. 
There is no way to bring it down from 
above. The man suffers from an emo- 
tional drought and he does not know how 
to remedy it. 

A man sometimes feels that he would 
give much for a reliable recipe for noble 
emotions. He can master his thoughts, 
but his feelings master him. They are 
like a company of untamed horses, and 
it seems that he can do nothing with 
them. 

Two illustrations of the tricks our 

51 



THE MAN OF POWER 

emotions like to play come quickly to 
mind. You have a friend to whom you 
are deeply devoted, but some day you 
wake to the consciousness that all feeling 
for that friend has silently fled away. 
You remember how your heart used to 
glow at the very thought of his name. 
It has been a singularly rich emotional 
friendship. Now it seems as if the emo- 
tion is completely used up. Nothing un- 
pleasant has happened. Your friend is 
still the same, but the sudden joy at the 
thought of him is an experience remem- 
bered, but not repeated. The experience 
seems like an oil well from which all the 
oil has been pumped out. The derrick is 
still there, but there is no more oil. 

The same experience is very frequent 
in the religious life. A man's conversion 
is like the bursting forth of a geyser. 
There is a leaping joy which completely 
fills the consciousness of the Christian. 
The day of conversion is the birthday 
of great emotions, as w^ell as the birthday 
of the soul. For days after the life is 
52 



EMOTIONAL EFFICIENCY 

borne along on a veritable tide of deep 
and rich feeling of the love of God. Life 
is set to music, and the day begins and 
ends with a song. All this is very de- 
lightful and a source of deep satisfaction, 
but sooner or later there comes a change. 
There dawns a day without a brilliant 
sunrise of joy. There comes a night 
without a golden sunset of noble emotion. 
The purpose of the soul is unchanged. 
Loyalty to Christ is still on the throne, 
but all the wonder and glow seems to 
have departed. Only cold hard facts are 
left. It is quite possible, now, to continue 
to serve Christ with the mind and the 
will, but it does not seem possible to serve 
him with the emotions. They refuse to 
act. They seem to have gone on a strike. 
One does not know what their demands 
are and he does not know how to come 
to terms with them. 

The first thing to realize in all such 

cases as these is that there is nothing the 

matter. No alarm bells need be rung. 

No call for the police needs to be sent 

53 



THE MAN OF POWER 

out. Nothing has been lost and nothing 
has been stolen. A man has not lost 
his friend and he has not lost his religion. 
He is simply passing through one of 
the experiences characteristic of a normal 
life. And the first step toward mastering 
it is to refuse to take it seriously. Man 
is not to live by emotions alone. Phan- 
toms of the mind, nightmares, and deca- 
dent powers may be made of emotions 
alone, but a solid and substantial charac- 
ter cannot be built up in that way. The 
man who goes hunting a lost emotion is 
on the most fruitless journey in the 
world. 

We may best approach the philosophy 
of the emotional life and the principles 
which underlie emotional efficiency by 
one statement. Emotions are always to 
be considered as by-products, and they 
are to be allowed to come or go as they 
will. In friendship, for instance, the 
central fact is a deep purpose of loyalty. 
That is the thing to be emphasized, and 
the feelings are just to take care of them- 
54 



EMOTIONAL EFFICIENCY 

selves. The truth is that the feelings are 
not nearly so independent as they seem. 
They can be controlled, but they must 
be controlled indirectly. In the long run 
they will follow the rest of the life, but 
they have a way of taking their own time 
to follow. This fact must be given 
recognition. 

If a man continues to cherish noble 
purposes and to do noble things, at last 
his emotional range will rise to the 
quality of his purposes and deeds. If 
he continues to refuse to cherish bad 
thoughts and to do bad things, the atmos- 
phere of his life at last will become one 
in which bad feelings cannot survive. 
There is a rudder for the guidance of the 
feelings, but it is a part of a complicated 
machinery, and we must be prepared to 
have it move slowly. 

In the case of a friendship like that 
we have already mentioned, the way to 
treat an emotional shrinkage is to ignore 
it. We are to treat the friend just as we 
treated him before. We are to plan 
55 



THE MAN OF POWER 

things for his pleasure and profit, and 
to be more thoughtful than ever of his 
comfort and well-being. We are to insist 
to ourselves that the friendship is based 
on a personal loyalty far deeper than 
any emotion. We are to forget all about 
the feeling of friendship in the practice 
of friendship. If we do this, the feeling 
in its own time will come back, warmer 
and richer than ever before. 

In the matter of a religious experience 
the same course is to be followed. If our 
hearts are throbbing with love for Christ, 
we will be glad indeed, but in the days 
when we have no particular Christian 
feeling we will remind ourselves that we 
still have Christian purposes, and purpose 
is a far deeper thing than feeling. We 
will insist on the genuineness of our 
loyalty to Christ. We will be all the 
more energetic about doing the things we 
know he would have us do. We will 
become so occupied with the matter of 
obeying Christ that we will not stop to 
think how we are feeling. Then, again, 

56 



EMOTIONAL EFFICIENCY 

at the very time when we have forgotten 
emotion, the emotion will come back. 
With a depth and wonder full of a 
great surprise our souls will be stirred by 
the love of God. When we forget all 
about an emotion in deep and active 
loyalty to the principle which is behind 
it, already the emotion is ready to come 
knocking at the door of our lives. 

The great foes of a normal and effi- 
cient emotional life are self -conscious- 
ness and an overemphasis on the emo- 
tions themselves. When we stop to 
analyze an emotion it has already de- 
parted. When we try to find a mirror 
which will reflect our emotional states we 
find that they resent this sort of treat- 
ment and leave us while we are getting 
the mirror in place. You can make a 
record of a thought, but you cannot write 
down an emotion. No photographer is 
able to take the picture of a feeling. 
There is really an ethical flaw in the em- 
phasis on emotions for their own sake. A 
man may come to the place where he 

57 



THE MAN OF POWER 

cares more for feeling noble than for be- 
ing noble, where he cares more for feeling 
righteous than for doing righteous 
things. The emotion of love may be the 
object of a man's desire rather than the 
life of love. 

When we regard noble purposes and 
noble deeds as the great matters and 
noble emotions as their by-products, we 
will have the whole matter in its right 
perspective. We are to rejoice in deep 
and rich emotions when they come. We 
are not to be disconcerted when they 

go. 

The center of the life of the Christian 
is trust and obedience. The set of the 
soul in personal commitment and loyalty 
to Christ is a deeper matter than any 
emotion. It is this deeper matter which 
must be constantly emphasized. So the 
life is kept robust and strong and saved 
from the restlessness of unnecessary 
doubt, and the lowering of the forces of 
the soul which comes from a self-con- 
scious sentimentality. 

58 



EMOTIONAL EFFICIENCY 

In this fashion we possess emotions, 
but they do not possess us. We are the 
masters of our feehngs, and they are not 
wild-eyed anarchists who dethrone rea- 
son and righteousness in the soul. They 
are noble steeds, trained to obey the 
hand of the driver, and they will carry 
us far, for there is no doubt of the fine 
serviceableness of the emotions when 
they are safely domesticated. As wild 
beasts they will rend us. As obedient 
creatures of our will they will serve us. 
The day of kindled feeling will be the 
day of most creative activity. The day 
when the emotional tide comes in will 
be a day of fullness and vital energy. 
When the whole orchestra of noble emo- 
tions is playing in the soul the life will 
be lifted to new ranges of thought and 
of activity. 

But the way to come to this day of 
emotional splendor is not by tampering 
with the emotions and trying to put them 
in tune. The way to reach the golden 
day is by journeying through many days 

59 



THE MAN OF POWER 

of steady and uniUumined loyalty; to 
keep our purposes high and our activities 
noble by a constant effort to do the will 
of God, trusting him in every endeavor. 
He will be helping us even in the unin- 
spired days, and in his own time and in 
his own way he will give us days when 
a creative; rapture fills our souls. Feel- 
ing will be a ministering angel giving a 
throbbing vitality to life which it never 
had before. Like the springtime, the 
days of emotional richness will come and 
go, but they will leave behind something 
of priceless value and beauty. 

A man has reached a place of eimo- 
tional efficiency when he lives as if he 
had no emotions, but makes the most of 
great and creative emotions when they 
come. Seek an emotion, and it will flee 
from you. Seek to commit your life 
completely to Christ and the loyal doing 
of his will, and the fountains will burst 
forth with the joy of life. The way to 
have noble emotions is to keep being a 
noble man, even when there is no feeling 
60 



EMOTIONAL EFFICIENCY 

at all. A man who is actually trusting 
the Saviour and obeying him will find 
that his Master takes care of the emo- 
tional enrichment of his life. 



6i 



VI 

THE EFFICIENT WILL 

There are men who have too many- 
wills; there are men who have too much 
will; there are men who have no wills 
at all; and there are men whose wills 
are the constant and dependable instru- 
ments of consistent and growing personal 
liws. If we think of these types, we shall 
be able to reach some important conclu- 
sions about the efficient will. 

A few years ago Mr. Barrie wrote a 
novel entitled Sentimental Tommy. It 
was the story of a boy who was the 
victim of his moods and whose moods 
were the reflection of his environment. 
Professor Henry van Dyke, in referring 
to the book or its sequel, Tommy and 
Grisel, called it the story of a man who 
never became a person. Tommy was a 
sort of human chameleon. At any par- 
62 



THE EFFICIENT WILL 

ticular time he had will enough, but it 
was the reflection of his surroundings. 
He was the moral mirror of the people 
among whom he found himself. He was 
the enthusiastic exponent of the point of 
view of the person with whom he hap- 
pened to be at the moment. The trouble 
with Tommy was not that he had no will. 
He had too many wills; his volitional life 
lacked continuity; he was capable of hav- 
ing a violent opinion one day and its 
opposite the next ; his emotions had taken 
out a mortgage on his character and were 
squandering his moral resources; his life 
had no unity or steadiness or consistency. 
It had passions, but no passion; it had 
enthusiasms, but no one permanent en- 
thusiasm; it had bits of willing, but no 
persistent continuity of will. Of such a 
type the Old Testament says, "Unstable 
as water, thou shalt not excel.'' 

The man of wills and not of will would 
be very amusing if he were not so tragic. 
He is trying to play many parts. He is 
trying to be a number of different people. 

63 



THE MAN OF POWER 

He is versatile, and there is much diver- 
sity in his experience, but he actually has 
no life of his own. li you try to find 
the real man, he forever eludes you, be- 
cause there is no real man. 

A story was once published entitled 
Lawmaker and Lawbreaker. It told the 
tale of the life of a man who by means 
of clever disguises was both a member of 
a legislative body, in a new country, and 
a daring robber. The quickness and 
agility required to play these two parts 
were extraordinary. But many a man 
whose life has no such dramatic con- 
trasts is a man of much more diverse 
experience as to his willing. You could 
make a collection of kinds of choices in 
his life, and you could find almost all the 
kinds which have ever been made. He 
is a whole play, with all the cast of 
characters himself. A man may find this 
sort of thing fascinating, but its cost is 
the loss of the most sacred and noblest 
things of life. Such a man becomes at 
last a mere collection of masks. 

64 



THE EFFICIENT WILL 

The opposite of all this is the man 
whose will takes the bit in its teeth andl 
runs away with him. He is not the mas- 
ter of his will. He is its victim. This 
man has no sudden turnings into fasci- 
nating byways. He has no dangerous 
versatility. All variety of experience is 
ruled out of his life. A few prejudices 
have crystallized into powerful motives 
and they guide all his action. He uses 
his mind to secure methods by means of 
which he may express his will, and not 
as a judge to pronounce upon it. The 
father of Elizabeth Barrett Browning is 
an illuminating illustration of this type 
in his treatment of his daughter. He 
never forgave her for marrying Robert 
Browning. He never read the letters she 
sent to him. Even letters marked with 
black and telling of some death — whose 
he did not know — were returned un- 
opened. He was the victim of a tyran- 
nous, implacable will. 

Many good men, whose lives are in 
most relations gentle and genial and full 

65 



THE MAN OF POWER 

of human sympathy, have some spots 
where their wills have proved too much 
for them. Touch one subject and the 
face hardens, while the eyes gleam like 
swords. There is now no careful and 
candid weighing of evidence. The case 
is judged before it is heard. The tyrant 
will is judge and he does not care to wait 
for evidence. The coming to light of 
this hard spot in a man's character has 
brought surprise and sorrow to many a 
household, and at last it has wrecked the 
happiness of many a home. 

A favorite type of character with Mrs. 
Augusta Evans Wilson, whose books 
once had such an extraordinary vogue, 
was the man whose will was too much 
for him. "St. Elmo" battled with his 
will for many a year, until at last he 
mastered it. During all these years the 
trouble with him was not lack of will 
but too much will. When the will takes 
spasms one sees ferocity, and when the 
will settles into rigidity one sees obsti- 
nacy. What a man calls strength of 
66 



THE EFFICIENT WILL 

character is often the clutch of a tyran- 
nous will. 

A somewhat less familiar type, and yet 
a type we all know, is the colorless per- 
son. He drifts about without any seem- 
ing reason. A man with too many wills 
drifts because everything is fascinating. 
A man with no will drifts because noth- 
ing is fascinating. This indifferent man, 
with dull, unkindled eyes and an expres- 
sion which seems to say, *'Here I am, but 
I might as well be anywhere else,'' is a 
difficult and pathetic figure as he moves 
through the world. There is no initia- 
tive, no energy, no enthusiasm. Life 
seems to be to him just one stupid thing 
after another. One is inclined to call him 
just a part of the human filling of the 
world. He has a place in the background 
of life's picture, but he never comes to 
the front. He asks nothing of life. He 
takes nothing from life. He just exists. 
What goes on behind those unillumined 
eyes ? What occurs beneath that dull and 
unexpressive exterior? Are there throbs 

67 



THE MAN OF POWER 

of desire, and purpose, and hope? The 
life is as inarticulate as Matthew Ar- 
nold's canary, which died without being 
able to make a sign. The last test of sym- 
pathy and outreaching love is this man 
whose will seems perpetually to slumber 
and who seems never to be roused by rest- 
less desire. 

All these types may be; said to represent 
the inefficient will, and now, by a process 
of elimination, we have reached the place 
where we must consider the will which 
is potent and powerful. Let the curtain 
rise and reveal the man of complete 
volitional efficiency. When the curtain 
rises this man is likely to resemble the 
tableaux of "Angels in Art" exhibited in 
some American cities, an ideal picture, 
but this ideal is a composite of character- 
istics we see every day in the lives of 
those about us. 

The man of highest volitional efficiency 
is a man in whom great ideas, great pur- 
poses, and steady loyalties combine. The 
very kind of steellike persistence which 
68 



THE EFFICIENT WILL 

would be obstinacy if devoted to some- 
thing petty becomes heroic when devoted 
to something great. The will is an in- 
strument which must be kept at worthy 
tasks, and the man of large and steady 
moral and mental perception has the 
ability to discriminate between that which 
must be secured at any cost and that for 
which it would be unworthy to enter a 
conflict. The will is an engine with steel 
couplers, and the man must see that it is 
united to the right car. This interplay 
of the forces of the mind and the forces 
of the will is of strategic importance. 
The fanatic is a man of heroic will but 
inadequate mental life. The man of ade- 
quate leadership unites a steel structure 
of will to a mental appraisal sure and 
effective. The mind is the captain of the 
will. 

The man of wide effectiveness does not 
keep his will tense all the while. It is 
like a fire engine, ready for use at any 
moment, but it has plenty of time for 
rest between periods of work. The man 

69 



THE MAN OF POWER 

who is every moment on edge with the 
energy of his loyalty is likely to end by 
having an attack of nervous prostration. 
The will ought never to be sent off on 
a vacation, but although it will rouse at 
the slightest signal, it must be given time 
for sleep. It is from this point of view 
that we can understand the serenity of 
many strong men. The whole mechanism 
of the volitional life is ready for instant 
service, but it is not kept in action so 
constantly that you can hear the wheels 
creak as they move. 

The efficient will is like an electric cur- 
rent transformed by a dynamo into 
motion. It is one power, but it may be 
harnessed to many things. It has one 
end in view, but this end may be secured 
in many ways. There is much possibility 
of adjustment in the forces of purpose 
as they are applied to the tasks of life, 
but the true purposes persist in their ulti- 
mate demands, though they have much 
room for variety as to method. That 
the thing gets done is much more impor- 
70 



THE EFFICIENT WILL 

tant than just how it is brought about. 
It is here that we see how the efficient 
will unites persistence and consistency 
with versatility. 

Last of all, the will of a completely 
efficient man is made Christian. It is 
like the man of whose life it is a part. 
It acknowledges the mastery of Christ. 

Our wills are ours, we know not how ; 
Our wills are ours, to make them thine. 

The final citadel to be surrendered to the 
Saviour is the stronghold of the will. 
Many men are willing to give their emo- 
tions to Christ. They are willing to have 
their ideas mastered by Christ, but their 
wills they would keep, at least in part, for 
themselves. Christianity, however, is 
essentially the religion of the mastered 
will. And the wonderful thing about the 
whole process is that a man's will is never 
more nobly or completely his own than 
after it has been given to Christ. It is 
cleansed, steadied, uplifted, strengthened, 
and given back such an instrument for 

71 



THE MAN OF POWER 

efificient activity as it never could be be- 
fore. A lawless will at last becomes im- 
potent. A will mastered by a law be- 
comes rigid and mechanical. A will sur- 
rendered to the personal Lordship of 
Christ becomes the steady and reliable 
organ of the activities of a rich and 
growing life. 

The apostle Paul was a striking ex- 
ample of the efficient will. He was per- 
sistently loyal, yet not obstinate. He was 
many-sided, yet not the victim of many 
wills. He was calm without indifference 
and passionate without fanaticism. Mind 
and will worked together, and both were 
mastered by the Lordship of Christ. 



72 



VII 

SPIRITUAL EFFICIENCY 

When you think of Lord Buddha sit- 
ting perfectly still while the snails gather 
upon his head, you have the idea of the 
East as to spirituaHty. It is infinitely 
quiet, full of a brooding, patient medi- 
tation which discards the thought of 
time. Like; Tennyson's brook, this 
dreamy, imbibing stillness goes on for- 
ever, while the little plans and the little 
activities of men pass by and are no more. 
"Thought is deeper than all speech, feel- 
ing deeper than all thought," it seems to 
say as it sits in the solitude of its own 
long introspection. 

Nor has the spirituality produced by 
the Christian Church always been free 
from this emphasis on an inner quiet with 
no thought of an outcome in the affairs 
of men at all. The captain of industry 
is not often a mystic, and the mystic is 

73 



THE MAN OF POWER 

not often a captain of industry. The 
brooding contemplation of the love of 
God as revealed in Christ and the per- 
sonal appropriation of all the inner 
blessedness of a Christian experience 
have not infrequently been taken as ends 
in themselves, rather than as means to the 
larger ends of the Kingdom. The inner 
communion has not always been followed 
by the outer communication. 

Thinking along these lines, we begin to 
wonder if we have any right to join to- 
gether such words as "spiritual" and 
"efficiency." Perhaps the spiritual are 
the poets of the inner life, by their very 
temperament and experience, destined to 
live a life free from hard and taxing 
external responsibility. Perhaps it is 
enough for them to feel, and we should 
never ask them to do. To agree with 
such a suggestion as this, however, comes 
at last to introduce a fatal dualism into 
the life. It is only by combining the in- 
ner and the outer that both are kept 
wholesome. The mystic and the man of 
74 



SPIRITUAL EFFICIENCY 

action are not to be two men. They are 
to be united into one man, two natures 
in one person, and from this standpoint 
we have a right to speak of spiritual effi- 
ciency. 

A somewhat careful analysis of what 
is involved in this conception will bring 
us to a number of statements which we 
may here; put down and amplify. If we 
regard them as expressions of vital reali- 
ties and not as hard and mechanical 
formulas, we shall best appreciate their 
meaning. In the first place, then, spiritual 
efficiency means that a man has peace 
without complacency. The quest for 
peace is a right noble journey, but, truth 
to tell, the goal sometimes seems strangely 
disappointing. The temper of the quest 
is so much finer in these cases than the 
temper after the goal has been reached. 
There is eager and intense spiritual am- 
bition in the quest. There is a subtly 
selfish satisfaction in the consciousness 
of attainment. "'I really seemed in a 
higher state of grace," said a discerning 

75 



THE MAN OF POWER 

man, as he discussed this type of experi- 
ence, "while I was seeking entire sancti- 
fication than after I beHeved I had found 
it." The higher state which has not the 
full ethical value of the lower is a contra- 
diction in terms. Yet it is not infre- 
quently seen in those who profess great 
spiritual attainments. Of course the real 
trouble with such people is that they are 
mistaken about what they have attained. 
To put it in Hibernian fashion: "When 
a man is complacent about what he has 
attained, he has not attained it." Chris- 
tian perfection, to paraphrase Martin 
Luther's fine words, "is like the per- 
fection of the eye, which can see every- 
thing else, but cannot see itself." Self- 
consciousness takes the fine flavor out of 
piety and again and again robs it of 
practical power. The peace of the high- 
est spirituality never allows a man to con- 
gratulate himself on his virtues as he 
looks in the mirror. 

In the second place, spiritual efficiency 
means that a man is possessed of serenity 

76 



SPIRITUAL EFFICIENCY 

without lethargy. It is not just easy to 
be serene without becoming lazy. There 
is an acceptance of the universe which 
makes up its mind that there is nothing 
more to do. It becomes sluggish and 
finally perishes of fatty degeneration of. 
the conscience. The serenity of the typi- 
cal old English squire after a hearty meal 
does not suggest either spirituality or 
efficiency. Yet very often the man of 
spiritual temper is tempted to accept his 
hearty meal of spiritual enjoyment and 
rest as quietly after as if he had found 
some spiritual equivalent of a mild cigar 
which soothed him without being over- 
stimulating. 

In the third place, spiritual efficiency 
involves the possession of energy with- 
out restlessness. The trouble with the 
wheels of life is that when they get go- 
ing, they do not want to stop. The very 
law of inertia which made the beginning 
of movement difficult makes its cessation 
far from easy. Many energetic people 
are always making motions whether they^ 

77 



THE MAN OF POWER 

are doing anything or not. They keep 
saying words even when they are not 
thinking, and they keep moving their 
hands even when they are doing nothing 
in particular. Of course all this involves 
dreadful waste and ultimate breakdown. 
That fine rhythmic relation between labor 
and repose is lost out of the life. The 
man who does not know how to rest does 
not know how to work. When a man's 
whole life is kindled by a noble spiritu- 
ality he must learn how to bank his fires 
so as to conserve their utmost heat. 

Then, spiritual efficiency means that a 
man is possessed of a godliness which is 
warmly human. '^Once when Julia Ward 
Howe invited Charles Sumner to meet a 
distinguished guest at her home, he re- 
plied : T do not know that I wish to meet 
your friend. I have outlived the interest 
in individuals.' Recording in her diary 
that^night the senator's surly remark, 
Mrs. Howe wrote after it, 'God Almighty 
by latest accounts has not got so far as 
that.' " 

78 



SPIRITUAL EFFICIENCY 

With some men piety takes a form not 
unlike Sumner's selfish isolation. They 
rejoice in the Lord; they do not rejoice 
in the Lord's world. They love God; 
they do not have any hearty and genuine 
love for God's children. They enjoy a 
type of religion which has made them 
inhuman. It must be clearly and strongly 
said that any religious experience which 
causes a man to withdraw from warm 
and eager interest in people has some- 
thing abnormal about it. We do not 
know much about the inner experience of 
God's life, but we do know a great deal 
about his love for people. The Bible is 
one long account of God's love for hu- 
manity. The more we really know of 
God, the more we will share his passion- 
ate interest in men. 

Once more, spiritual efficiency means 
the possession of a sturdy virility chas- 
tened by a noble mysticism. Sir W. Rob- 
ertson Nicoll once said in the British 
Weekly, "The saint must smack of the 
good brown earth, and not of blanched 
79 



THE MAN OF POWER 

cambric." Now, there are plenty of men 
of quick moving, red blood in the world, 
and there are men of rich and deep piety 
not a few, but the men of red blood are 
often galloping straight to the devil, and 
the men of piety too often do not smack 
of the good brown earth. When a man 
with all the fire of a great virility burn- 
ing in him becomes also a man of the 
inner communion you have a product of 
singular power both with God and men. 
His spiritual experience steadies and 
controls him, and his virility adds to 
his religion a new quality of human 
efficiency. 

To conclude our catalogue of qualities 
which go to make up spiritual efficiency : 
It necessarily involves a fellowship with 
God which issues in practical activity, 
Dwight L. Moody met Dr. Grenfell, of 
Labrador, some years after Gren fell's 
conversion. When the young man told 
Mr. Moody of the night in London when 
the evangelist's words had changed the 
current of his life Moody bent his eyes 
80 



SPIRITUAL EFFICIENCY 

upon him and asked, "And what have 
you been doing since?" This is the test 
of every great experience of spiritual 
things, ''What have you been doing 
since?'' The inner Hfe is a dynamo which 
is to set in motion all the activities of a 
noble life. Fellowship with God is a 
divine rapture which is to come forth in 
human service. When God gives a man 
a new heart he also gives him a new 
program. When he fills his soul with 
joy he fills his hands with work. *'By 
their fruits ye shall know them." 

We have spent some time analyzing 
spiritual efficiency. One great question 
remains : How shall we attain it ? Have 
we been dealing in councils of perfec- 
tion, or can the thing actually be accom- 
plished? The lives of multitudes of men 
who have discovered the secret are an 
adequate reply. From Paul to Luther, 
from Luther to Wesley, spiritual effi- 
ciency has been known to men. And the 
secret of it all is the very heart of the 
gospel. It is a personal appropriation 
8i 



THE MAN OF POWER 

of the mighty ministry of the reconciHa- 
tion of the Son of God upon the cross. 
The man who has found forgiveness at 
Calvary has peace, yet he can never be 
complacent. His peace cost the Son of 
God too much for that. He has serenity, 
but his devotion to the living Christ will 
not allow it to become lethargy. He has 
energy, but under all so deep a trust in 
the divine Saviour that there is no place 
for restlessness. 

The growing sense of the meaning of 
the Incarnation, of the Son of God be- 
coming the Son of man, keeps his godli- 
ness warmly and richly human. The 
virility which draws him to Jesus Christ, 
as the most virile character in history, is 
chastened and mastered by his inner 
appropriation of the message of the cross 
and its ministries. His fellowship with 
God is mediated through the living 
Christ, who has a mighty program for 
the regeneration of the world. He shares 
in the joy of his Lord, and that joy is 
the joy of saving and transforming the 
82 



SPIRITUAL EFFICIENCY 

life of humanity. So at the cross, and 
going forth with the meaning of the cross 
in his heart, a man is given the power 
of the highest spiritual efficiency. 



83 



VIII 

SOCIAL EFFICIENCY 

Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes^ in 
that beautiful and touching poem "The 
Voiceless," has brought us into the pres- 
ence of one of life's poignant tragedies. 
He is writing of those to whom the gift 
of adequate expression has been denied. 
The whole matter is gathered up into a 
couple of revealing lines : 

Alas for those who never sing, 

But die with all their music in them! 

Social inefficiency is largely a matter 
of lack of ability to express in adequate 
fashion what one feels. Of course there 
is such a thing as not having anything 
to express. There are some people out 
of whose eyes the soul never looks, be- 
cause there is no soul; and the tragedy 
of the soulless is infinitely more terrible 
than the tragedy of the voiceless. The 
84 



SOCIAL EFFICIENCY 

very basis of all true social life is the 
communion of noble minds and hearts. 
If there is no inner nobility there can be 
no communion, and the empty life must 
seek the great fountains of nobility and 
be filled before there can be any possi- 
bility of deeply real and rich social life. 

At this point comes the trade of the 
social counterfeiters. To some types of 
people it is easier to play a part than to 
accept the responsibility of sincere emo- 
tion. So they are all the while attempting 
to express what they do not feel and 
going through the motions of experiences 
which they do not possess. There have 
been very clever counterfeiters, but their 
coins have a way of ringing hollow, and 
they lose color at last. The bane of social 
life is the hard, flat sound of its make- 
believe coin. 

Granted, however, that a man is pos- 
sessed of true and genuine life and feel- 
ing, we come again to the difficulty 
which Dr. Holmes's poem expressses. 
There are such numbers of people who 

85 



THE MAN OF POWER 

never know how to get into expression 
what they are and what they feel. 

Sometimes the difficulty is physical. 
Mrs. Edith Wharton somewhere de- 
scribes a character whose face was carved 
into the lines which expressed her rarest 
mood. Then she goes on to speak of 
the people with whom nature has played 
tricks in such fashion that they perpetu- 
ally seem to be expressing something 
petty. There are faces, for instance, 
which seem a lifelong protest against the 
size of the butcher's bill. The body is 
often at odds with the life within. A 
gentle soul with fair and delicate thoughts 
dwells in a corpulent body, and there is 
a perpetual duel between the personal 
taste of the dweller in that physical bulk 
and the mass of body through which it 
must express itself. 

There are sensitive souls, with a feel- 
ing for all fine lines and subtle artistic 
effects, which dwell in bodies angular and 
awkward, which seem perpetually to say 
that they ought to be somewhere else. 
86 



SOCIAL EFFICIENCY 

There are kindly and winsome souls 
which must look out of faces which seem 
just about to make a declaration of war 
on society. A belligerent face often im- 
prisons a loving life. Now, all this makes 
for social inefficiency. The invisible 
spirit is contradicted by the visible pres- 
ence, and there is misunderstanding and 
heartache enough. 

Sometimes the difficulty is verbal. 
There are people whose words always 
come out upside down. There are people 
whose words are like rusty tin pails with 
holes in them. The feeling they carry 
leaks through and is lost before they 
reach their destination. There are people 
with a fatal gift for the wrong word. 
With the best intentions in the world they 
let fly a verbal arrow which is barbed to 
bear away a message of love. Then they 
wonder at the wound, and have not the 
least notion of what they have done. 

Sometimes the difficulty is self -con- 
sciousness. Many people feel deeply and 
nobly as long as there is no need of ex- 

87 



THE MAN OF POWER 

pression, but the moment when they 
ought to put their feeHngs into motion 
they scamper away Kke scared rabbits, 
and only formal, stilted, and conventional 
speech results. The self-conscious man 
always stands in his own light. His own 
shadow towers above him tall and menac- 
ing, and he is left helpless. 

Sometimes the difficulty is a failure to 
understand other people. The man has 
no physical or verbal difficulty, and he is 
not self-conscious, but he fails to appraise 
adequately those with whom he is living 
and with whom he must have social rela- 
tions. He has not been able to enter into 
their interests or hopes or fears. He 
talks with enthusiasm of things for which 
they do not care. He suggests projects 
the very thought of which repulses them. 
He does not really know the men and 
women about him, and so he is a social 
failure. 

Sometimes it is a narrow range of per- 
sonal interest which blights a man's social 
career. He cares about only a few 
88 



SOCIAL EFFICIENCY 

things. The great world of activity and 
achievement outside these small personal 
concerns does not appeal to him. He has 
not sent out the tentacles of personal in- 
terest to cling to all wholesome and 
stimulating things. His eyes are dull and 
his heart unkindled when most subjects 
are discussed. So he sits listless and 
heavy, a burden to himself and a burden 
to others. 

In the midst of so much possibility of 
social failure, of so many sidetracks on 
which our social express may find itself, 
how shall we keep the train on the main 
line? What are the characteristics of 
social efficiency, and how may it be se- 
cured? What is Christian social effi- 
ciency, and in what way does a growing 
Christian life promote social adequacy? 

The one great word in all social rela- 
tions is the word LOVE. If we are go- 
ing to have any community life which is 
deep and rich, it must be based on a 
genuine feeling of brotherhood. A true 
Christian experience so touches and re- 

89 



THE MAN OF POWER 

news a man's inner life that it makes him 
into a brother of all other men. He does 
not need to play at brotherliness. He is 
actually a brother. The foundation of 
all social adequacy is at this point. A 
man was once describing his complete 
failure in dealing with a certain group of 
people when a discerning friend asked, 
*'Have you loved them?" The one ques- 
tion touched the source of weakness and 
the man went back to succeed where he 
had failed. 

Now, whenever the feeling of brother- 
hood is heightened into a steady passion 
of love, it has a way of brushing aside 
what would otherwise be obstacles. The 
people who saw the awkward and am- 
bling form and the homely face of Abra- 
ham Lincoln often felt that his every 
physical characteristic was in the way of 
any attraction and winning expression. 
But to the multitudes who saw that face 
transformed by sympathy and love it be- 
came almost beautiful. It is not too much 
to say that the very physical limitations 
90 



SOCIAL EFFICIENCY 

of Lincoln have been caught up into the 
ideal picture of him which the nation has 
enshrined in its heart. 

Physical limitations, when mastered by 
a passionate brotherhood, may actually 
become resources. The contrast between 
a man's looks and what we know him 
to be comes at last to have a fascinating 
interest. We would not give to Abraham 
Lincoln the face and form of the Apollo 
Belvedere if we could. 

Then a growing love for men comes 
to be an instinct for right words. A good 
man who loves a little may be guilty of 
constant verbal fumbles; but as love 
grows and becomes a possessing passion, 
a man develops a new intuition as to 
speech. He comes to have an instinct 
that certain words would wound, and if 
at times this instinct fails, his love for 
his fellow men so shines out of his eyes 
that you cannot misunderstand him and 
you are ready to forgive his blunder. As 
far as words are concerned there is no 
inspiration like unselfish love. And love 

91 



THE MAN OF POWER 

delivers from self -consciousness. You 
are so busy thinking about the other man 
that you forget about yourself. In this 
very experience a man touches a height 
of social adequacy no artificial effort 
could climb. Really to be engrossed with 
the man with whom you find yourself is 
to pay him a compliment beyond which 
it is impossible to go. At the same time 
the false steps and false movements of 
the self-conscious become impossible. A 
man is so taken up with the thought of 
the other man that his own shadow does 
not frighten him. He forgets that he has 
a shadow. 

Then love enlarges the range of a 
man's interests. If we care about an- 
other man, we want to know about the 
things for which he cares. In this man- 
ner many a mother has become interested 
in baseball and football and has become 
an actual chum to her son. The ranges 
of art and letters, of history and phi- 
losophy, of science and all the busy ac- 
tivities of men have been opened to many 
92 



SOCIAL EFFICIENCY 

a man because the key of love for human 
beings and interest in all their thoughts 
and activities opened the door for him. 

Then love gives a touch of reality, a 
final note of distinction to all life's ameni- 
ties and gentle courtesies. What is arti- 
ficial if it is insincere becomes nobly 
beautiful when it is the real expression 
of the life. We do not need to do away 
with the gracious social expressions 
which have come down from the past. 
We do need to save them from falseness 
and to keep them completely sincere;. 
Love puts a soul into the body of social 
life. What would otherwise become a 
corpse in process of decay becomes a 
living being with a growing and noble 
Hfe. 

Love not only puts a soul into old 
forms of social life, but it finds new 
forms. Because it is alive it is creative. 
It finds new paths. It is a discoverer and 
an inventor, and the surprise of new ways 
and words is always found in its pres- 
ence. Its own ways are full of the glow 

93 



THE MAN OF POWER 

of an untiring energy and a constant 
gladness. 

Then love has a way of understanding 
that which is inadequate in the social ex- 
pression of others, and by its very sym- 
pathy putting them all at their ease and 
helping them to express the thing they 
really feel. The finest gracefulness is 
that which makes awkwardness forget 
that it is awkward. The voiceless begin 
to feel that they may have a voice after 
all when they come into the presence of 
this loving, understanding courtesy. 

Love goes even farther. It awakens in 
selfish and unlovely souls the desire to be 
what they are not. It arouses a desire 
for its own winsomeness. The most 
wonderful thing about a Christian gentle- 
man is the fact that in his presence a boor 
ceases to be a boor. Because a Christian 
experience sets a fountain of love bub- 
bling in a man's heart, it is the most 
potent source of social efficiency. 



94 



IX 

PROFESSIONAL EFFICIENCY 

Victor Hugo, in Les Miserables, tells 
of a man so curiously constituted that 
life actually offered to him but two alter- 
natives: he could be a thief or he could 
be a criminal detective. Nature had so 
made him that his interest must be in 
crime, either in committing it or in bring- 
ing criminals to justice. It was not a 
very wide range, but it allowed room for 
the great decision between good and evil, 
between virtue and vice. He decided to 
become a detective. Now, we will all 
agree at once that this character of the 
great French writer is an abnormal speci- 
men, but for all that he does illustrate the 
fact that nature must be given a hearing 
when a man decides on his profession. 
Written in his brain cells, and in the very 
bone and fiber of his life, are some facts 
which ought to be determining in this 
extremely important choice. A man can 
95 



THE MAN OF POWER 

never come to complete efficiency if his 
work is a constant battle with his nature 
and his aptitudes. 

In his charming poem "The Vain 
King," Henry van Dyke tells of a man 
who wanted to do everything well. He 
desired to excel everybody else in his 
kingdom at every particular point. He 
wanted to be the center of every picture, 
and he ended by being the center in one 
picture, the portrait of a fool. He had 
not studied his own life to find a place 
where he could attain mastery, through 
long discipline and practice and effort. 
He tried his hand at everything and he 
did nothing really well. 

If a man is going to attain professional 
efficiency, he must have one profession, 
and not several. He must not waste 
brain and brawn in the endeavor to have 
a number of lifeworks. He must find his 
bent, his line of ability, and then he must 
continually say, "This one thing I do." 

As a young man touches life in various 
places and in various ways he will find 

96 



PROFESSIONAL EFFICIENCY 

that some lines of work appeal to him, 
while others repulse him. Here is a 
young man whose fingers fairly tingle 
with an instinctive desire to bind up 
wounds. His hand has delicacy and ten- 
derness and firmness. In some sudden 
crisis away from a hospital he has the 
opportunity of assisting an able surgeon. 
The man whom he is helping watches his 
quiet deft movements, and when the 
operation is over he declares, ''Nature 
meant you to be a surgeon." The call to 
his lifework is in his fingers and his 
habits of mind. And because he is so 
equipped he will become most effective in 
this particular work. 

Another young man finds himself in a 
group of men interested in financial ven- 
tures. He is himself surprised at the 
interest he takes in their talk. His mind 
fairly leaps with intuitive comprehension 
of the financial processes they are describ- 
ing. He begins to ask questions. They 
are clean-cut and discerning. He finds 
that^he can see the meaning of a financial 
97 



THE MAN OF POWER 

situation, that he has an instinct for ap- 
praising movements in the world o£ trade. 
Long and patient industry will be re- 
quired to make him an expert, but he has 
the habit of mind which points to a life 
spent in financial circles. 

Another man has an eye which takes 
naturally to minute and careful observa- 
tion, and a mind which shows from the 
start a habit of methodical classification. 
As a boy he makes collections of birds 
and insects. He has an enthusiasm for 
facts usually unnoticed. He is never 
so happy as when he has come into pos- 
session of a new fact. All this expresses 
nature's guidance in his choice of a life- 
work. Some aspect of natural science is 
to command the working days of his 
career. By his side there grows up a boy 
with a habit of brooding meditation over 
life and its mysteries. With joyous en- 
thusiasm he plunges into books which 
have to do with philosophy and the expla- 
nation of life's ultimate problems. Be- 
fore he enters college he is at home with 

98 



PROFESSIONAL EFFICIENCY 

the thought of Plato, of Aristotle, of 
Kant and of Hegel. His eye passes over 
many names in notices of books, but he 
is sure to find the works of Eucken and 
Bergson. It does not require special in- 
sight to see that this young man is meant 
for a philosophical career. 

The gift of incisive and impressive 
speech comes easily to some men. If they 
have an idea, they can put it into words 
which take wings and fly, or other words 
which, like sharp swords, can smite. As 
we watch the developing of this gift of 
effective expression we know that they 
were meant for a career where the out- 
standing activity will be public speech. 

These are only illustrations of the 
sharp and clear way in which nature 
often writes her mandates in our lives. 
True it is that often the inscription is not 
so definite and easily deciphered as in 
the cases which we have mentioned, but 
in all lives it is true that patient scrutiny 
and careful testing will bring to fight 
some subject which brings brightness to 

99 



THE MAN OF POWER 

the eye and puts a pressure on the will. 
When this is found nature has spoken. 

The first step, then, in professional effi- 
ciency is the hearing and the heeding of 
the voice of nature. The second is that 
long and hard process of training by 
which natural ability becomes complete 
equipment and practical power. Great 
ability has often proved the foe of bril- 
liant young men. Conscious of a power 
beyond that possessed by their com- 
panions, they have drifted into the con- 
clusion that for them life would be just 
a series of bright flashes of natural gifts. 
They have supposed that ability could 
take the place of work. In the end the 
men of plodding industry have left these 
clever idlers far behind. 

The discipline of the schools, the 
knowledge which comes from patient and 
prolonged reading, the skill which comes 
from the practical application of the prin- 
ciples a man has mastered — all of these by 
slow processes of experience and labor 
build a man up into his full strength. 

lOO 



PROFESSIONAL EFFICIENCY 

Besides the constant attention which a 
man gives to the Hne of work which is 
to be his own, one or two other things 
will greatly add to his ultimate efficiency. 
The first of these is attention to his body. 
The man who is physically fit will do 
anything better than the man of equal 
ability whose bodily mechanism cannot 
be depended upon. A boyhood in the 
open air, with constant and hearty in- 
terest and experience in athletics, a body 
k^t clean and mastered by a noble self- 
restraint, and a life lived in such fashion 
as to keep the wheels of the bodily 
mechanism always well oiled, will bring 
a man to the place where all there is of 
him can be put without strain or deadly 
reaction into his work. The physical and 
nervous wreck may become a hero and do 
wonderful work in spite of his handicaps, 
but he can never do what he might have 
done had he been completely robust and 
physically fit. 

Another thing which contributes to a 
man's success is the range of his general 

lOI 



THE MAN OF POWER 

interest. Just as he must be an expert 
in one thing, so he should have a vivid 
interest in many things. His grasp of 
his own subject will be all the more com- 
plete, and his effectiveness in his own 
field the more certain, if his mind is kept 
fresh and elastic by many other interests. 
Any man is stronger for being a citizen 
of the world of letters and art, of history 
and social movements, and of the great 
masters who have tried to understand 
and interpret life. 

When a man's profession is chosen 
along the line of his natural bent; when 
through an adequate course of training 
and discipline he has changed natural 
ability into full equipment and skill ; when 
he has kept his body strong and full of 
the swinging energy of health ; and when 
a large interest in men and things and 
movements saves him from narrow pro- 
vincialism, we may be ready to say that 
he is assured of professional efficiency. 

One more thing needs to be said, how- 
ever. If a man is to have the fullest 

I02 



PROFESSIONAL EFFICIENCY 

impact upon the world as a worker, his 
lifework must be in harmony with his 
deepest moral convictions and his deepest 
spiritual purposes. If a man's con- 
science does not approve of his work, 
he may drown its voice and keep at the 
work, but this inner conflict will rob him 
of the highest efficiency. The conscious- 
ness that he is all the while at war 
with his noblest ideals of the way in 
which life should be spent saps his 
energy. Conscience has its revenge when 
its voice is not heeded, and the man who 
has one code of morals for his private 
life and another for his professional ac- 
tivity finds some subtle power weakening 
his efforts and keeping him from flinging 
his undivided manhood into his work. 

Christian professional efficiency con- 
sists in the choosing of a career of which 
Christ would approve, in the preparing 
for it by methods which he would sanc- 
tion, and in the exercise of its activities 
in a fashion which is in accordance with 
his will. In this way the whole undiluted 
103 



THE MAN OF POWER 

energy of a man's life is poured into his 
work. Nature has chosen his career; 
training has built him into practical skill ; 
health and largeness of outlook con- 
tribute to his adequacy; and heart and 
conscience pour approval and enthusiasm 
into his work. The whole organism of 
the man's life works together to produce 
the largest possible result. 

When the voice of conscience and the 
voice of the spiritual life are heard with 
full respect, there will be men whom they 
summon to a life of special moral and 
spiritual endeavor. The growing convic- 
tion that in a peculiar sense a man should 
be about his Master's business is the be- 
ginning of the call to preach. As it 
deepens until it becomes an unrest when 
the thought of any other work is sug- 
gested, as it masters and possesses the 
mind and heart, and as it is confirmed by 
the judgment of wise Christian men and 
women, it becomes the assurance that 
God sets apart for his own prophetic 
work the man who has heard the call. 
104 



PROFESSIONAL EFFICIENCY 

Here too nature, and training, and health, 
and largeness of sympathy and outlook 
will make their great contribution, and 
all will be lifted into large potency 
through the consciousness that the Master 
of life has driven his servant into the 
great labor of the kingdom of God. 

Professional efficiency worked out 
along the lines we have discussed cotpes 
to be not a mere ideal, but an actual fact. 
All there is of a man is put into all of 
his work. Body and mind, conscience 
and the sense of the divine approval, the 
task and the joyous activity of the work- 
er, all combine to produce a man who 
goes in serene power to the labor of each 
day. Both the man who engages in secu- 
lar labor, as we call it, and the man who 
is in a special sense a religious worker 
are called to their tasks and are to per- 
form them in the light of their devotion 
to God. So choosing their work and 
doing it, they will make their full contri- 
bution to the progress of the world. 

105 



X 

THE EFFICIENT CHURCHMAN 

There are a great many men in the 
world to-day who would like to be called 
Christians, but would not like to be called 
churchmen. They have accepted the 
teachings of Jesus and his program for 
the life of men. They are trying to 
appropriate his spirit in all the relations 
of life. Many of them have accepted 
his Lordship and trust him as a personal 
Saviour. But with all this, they have a 
distrust of organization in religion. They 
abhor ecclesiastical machinery. They are 
suspicious of the wheels within wheels 
which make up much of the modern com- 
plicated ecclesiastical life. They do not 
feel any pulse of reality in many of the 
dogmatic assertions of the creeds. They 
believe that after an assertion has lost 
vitality, the church often keeps uttering 
it by main force. They have a feeling 
io6 



THE EFFICIENT CHURCHMAN 

that the church easily loses contact with 
reality while it is paying attention to the 
oiling of its vast machinery. So they 
make a distinction between the kingdom 
of God and the church. They are enthu- 
siastic about the kingdom of God. They 
are cold, if not hostile, in their relation 
to the church. Abraham Lincoln repre- 
sents the type of man increasingly Chris- 
tian in temper and activity, but never 
feeling that the church compels his alle- 
giance. 

The real difficulty which lies under the 
scruples and hesitations of these men is 
in the fact that the point where; the heav- 
enly touches the earthly is bound to feel 
the influence of the earth. The moment 
you begin to organize godliness there 
enter in some elements which are not 
godly. You expect to find a pot of gold 
where the rainbow touches the earth. 
You find the pot, and you find the gold 
in it, but you are shocked to find that 
the pot contains other things besides the 
gold. Now, the price you pay for an 
107 



THE MAN OF POWER 

external, visible organization of religion 
is the presence of secular elements. They 
are to be frowned upon, they are to be 
reduced to the lowest possible influence, 
but in spite of everything present they 
will be. The wheat will grow with the 
tares until the day of the harvest. 

Now, the practical question is, Does 
the organization of godliness prove so 
effective and the lack of it so disastrous 
that men of the Kingdom should accept 
it in spite of its obvious faults? The 
answer ought not to be hard to make. 
iTtn every other line of life we know 
that organization is the price of effi- 
ciency. The unorganized is the impotent. 
Through organization decisive impact 
upon the life of the world is secured. It 
is just a little strange that at the very 
time when we are recognizing the neces- 
sity of organization in every other regard 
we are suspicious of organized religion. 
Capital feels that it must organize; labor 
rejoices in its powerful organizations, 
yet some men would have religion remain 
io8 



THE EFFICIENT CHURCHMAN 

a disembodied spirit. If they were 
heeded, reHgion would come to be just 
about as powerful as a ghost. Religion 
is the soul of life, but to do work in 
the world it must have a body. 

The church invisible is made up of all 
those who accept the Lordship of Christ 
and trust him for salvation and spend 
their lives striving to carry out his be- 
hests. The kingdom of God is made up 
of all those who in sincerity and rightness 
of purpose are endeavoring to secure 
righteousness and brotherhood in the 
world. The visible church is the organi- 
zation which combines Christian men for 
efficient activity. There are men in the 
invisible church who are not a part of 
this organization. There are many men 
in the kingdom of God who do not belong 
to the church, and there are men in the 
church, despite all precautions, who be- 
long neither to the kingdom of God nor 
to the company of those who have ac- 
cepted the Lordship of Christ. In spite 
of all this, however, the church is the 
109 



THE MAN OF POWER 

greatest instrument of God in the secur- 
ing of his purposes among men. It is 
to be regarded as an instrument, and not 
as a fetish, but so regarded, we must 
admit that it is the most potent means 
by which God reahzes his will in the 
world. 

With these considerations in the back- 
ground of our thought, we; may analyze 
and appraise the efficient churchman and 
his work. In the first place, the efficient 
churchman is a Christian. His church 
membership is the visible sign of an in- 
ward grace. The church is not a polite 
means of evading a religious experience; 
it is a means of keeping it alive and of 
adequately expressing it. Our church- 
man has personally accepted Jesus Christ 
as his Saviour and Lord. His own life 
has been renewed by the power of the 
great Redemption. The "new life in 
Christ" is his secure personal possession. 
With heart aglow and life lifted to 
solemn urgency through the power of the 
indwelling Christ, he enters the church, 
no 



THE EFFICIENT CHURCHMAN 

As far as this man is personally con- 
cerned there is no distinction between the 
church invisible and the visible church. 
He belongs to both. 

Then the efficient churchman uses the 
church as a means to keep alive and 
potent all his Christian feelings and mo- 
tives and purposes. Worship is a per- 
petual kindling and keeping alive of the 
fires of his devotion. The services of the 
church offer food for his soul. He feels 
that it is no more unwarrantably selfish 
to seek for this food than it is to seek 
for the food of the body. A man does 
not have to starve in order to be unselfish. 
Good food for the body and for the soul 
is a part of the normal life. The church 
is a storehouse of spiritual food. 

The efficient churchman realizes that 
the church is not an end in itself, but a 
means to the ends of God's kingdom. 
The new life in Christ is the priceless 
possession of the church, and it is to 
share this possession with all who will 
receive it. The efficient churchman be- 
III 



THE MAN OF POWER 

lieves that every Christian should be an 
evangehst. Every Christian should be 
winning others for Jesus Christ; every 
Christian should be leading others to the 
place where in a vital personal way they 
accept Jesus as Saviour and Lord. That 
the fires of a great evangelism may be 
kept burning brightly is the ambition of 
the man who understands the significance 
of the life of the church; so he sets about 
welcoming strangers to the church serv- 
ices; he sets about securing their friend- 
ship, he counts no year satisfactory in 
which it has not been his joy to see some 
of them personally make the great de- 
cision. The church is the home of high 
decisions, and to keep securing them is 
the constant effort of all those who fully 
understand its work and give themselves 
to it. 

More than this, our churchman realizes 
that he has a responsibility for the other 
men and women who with him are a part 
of the church's life. He must so live 
and work that because of his presence 

112 



THE EFFICIENT CHURCHMAN 

the church is a help and not a hindrance 
to all the other people who belong to it. 

What kind of a church would this church be 
If all its members were just like me? 

is a question which he frequently asks 
himself. He knows that some of the 
members will be inclined to become just 
like him. He knows that the very atmos- 
phere of his life will help to make up the 
meaning of the church to many another 
member, and the thought of making the 
church a place of deeper beauty and 
power in the lives of all others is with 
him every day. 

The efficient churchman believes that 
the church must be a constant servant 
of the life of the whole community. He 
gives his hearty support to every en- 
deavor to make it touch the community 
life in more vital fashion. When he sees 
boys coming to the church gymnasium, 
when he sees enthusiastic young athletes 
going off to baseball and football games 
of the church clubs, he recognizes that 

113 



THE MAN OF POWER 

the church is actually making the normal 
experiences of boyhood its personal care 
and giving them its supervision. He is 
a leader in all such movements; he is 
ready to assist in social surveys of the 
community where the church is located; 
he is a constant student of the life of the 
people and the way in which they may 
be helped. Through varieties of clubs, 
through lecture courses, and many kinds 
of entertainments he works to make the 
church a wholesome social center in the 
life of the community. By scientifically 
conducted teaching of its young people 
he sees the church becoming a center for 
religious education. Like the poet Ter- 
ence, he can say, ^*A11 that concerns 
humanity is of interest to me" ; and he 
focuses all this human interest on the 
problem of how to make the church un- 
derstand and serve the masses of men. 

Some one has said, ''Every man has a 
hero sleeping within him, but it some- 
times takes a bugle blast to rouse the 
hero." The study of community condi- 
114 



THE EFFICIENT CHURCHMAN 

tions will reveal many a wrong to be 
righted, and the bugle must sound forth 
to rouse men to action. The church is 
the natural center for all movements of 
reform and social regeneration. The effi- 
cient churchman is very ambitious to 
have his church come to a place of leader- 
ship in every good fight. The church 
is to be the birthplace of reform and the 
trainer of reformers. All of this will 
sometimes mean stress and strain, and 
there are times when it will mean the 
kind of sacrifice which requires actual 
bravery, but the true churchman is 
jealous for the moral honor of the church 
and he is ready to pay the price for 
leadership in the things of practical 
righteousness. He does not forget that 
his God is the God of battles. 

Every community has its groups of 
young men alive with social passion and 
the eagerness of a great vision of human 
brotherhood. They are not mature, they 
often make mistakes, but they are the 
hope of the community, and our church- 

115 



THE MAN OF POWER 

man is all the while working to make 
them feel completely at home within the 
church, and that as men of the church 
they can best serve the interests of right- 
eousness and brotherhood. The church 
which alienates the young apostles of 
social regeneration loses its fairest hope. 

There is a picture of Jesus holding a 
globe in his hand. The efficient church- 
man may not have seen that picture, but 
he has caught that vision. His Lord is 
to be the master of the planet; the im- 
perial faith is to conquer the world. 
With this thought become a passionate 
conviction he works to make his church 
a center of missionary information and 
zeal and giving. 'Tacts form the fuel 
by which missionary fervor is fired and 
fed." 

The man of the church opens his own 
mind to the facts which reveal the world- 
wide situation and opportunity. Then he 
becomes a distributor of facts fired with 
his personal enthusiasm. By reading and 
prayer, and talking and giving, he ex- 
ii6 



THE EFFICIENT CHURCHMAN 

presses his loyalty to the world-wide 
movement of the church of God. 

Thus with ever-expanding knowledge 
and vision and consecration the true 
churchman gives himself to the great 
Christian tasks. He knows the limita- 
tions of the church. He knows too that 
they may be reduced, and by his own 
efforts and life he constantly aids in mak- 
ing the church a completely efficient in- 
strument for the accomplishment of the 
purposes of God. 



117 



XI 

THE EFFICIENT CITIZEN 

There is a difiference between the 
emotion of patriotism and the Hfe of 
patriotism. In that delightful poem, 
'^America for Me/' Henry van Dyke 
sings joyously: 

O, London is a man's town, there's power in the 

air; 
And Paris is a woman's town, with flowers in 

her hair; 
And it's sweet to dream in Venice, and it's great 

to study Rome; 
But when it comes to living, there is no place like 

home. 

Such musical praise of America sets 
the hearts of Americans to beating to the 
rhythm of a patriotic enthusiasm. But 
many a man who enjoys patriotic heart- 
thrills never coins his enthusiastic na- 
tional feeling into the activity of an effi- 
cient citizen. As a matter of fact, 
ii8 



THE EFFICIENT CITIZEN 

especially for men of a certain tempera- 
ment, it is easier to die for one's country 
than to live for it. In one splendid 
minute of abandoned devotion you can 
get through with dying, but living is a 
long and laborious process. If it took 
as long to die as it takes to live, many a 
martyr would not have won this particu- 
lar sort of crown. 

The Christian man, we take it for 
granted, wants to live for his country. 
Now, how shall he set about becoming 
an efficient citizen? The answer is 
neither simple nor easy; but, for that 
matter, none of the great answers are. 
We will not try to solve the problem by 
reducing it to an unreal and artificial 
simplicity. To talk about complex things 
in a way which makes them verbally 
simple, without really making them less 
perplexing, is a favorite device with 
rhetoricians, who substitute phrases for 
solutions and words for ideas. 

Now, if a man is really ready to face 
this perplexing matter of citizenship in 
119 



THE MAN OF POWER 

earnest and serious fashion, he may be 
told that several things go to make up 
an efficient American. 

In the first place, he must understand 
his country. We do not mean its geog- 
raphy, though if the romance of its 
mountains and river systems and wide- 
lying plains has gotten into his blood, he 
has become a member of that royal geo- 
graphical society which consists of those 
who have eyes to see the meaning of 
geography for human life. A country is 
like Boston as H. G. Wells characterized 
it. "Boston," he said, "is not a place, 
but a state of mind." Likewise, a great 
nation is not so much a place as a state 
of mind, and often it is a number of 
states qf mind engaged in ferocious battle 
for the supremacy. If a man under- 
stands what ideas are armed to the teeth 
and fighting for a place in the national 
life, and what ideas ought to be victori- 
ous, he has taken the first step toward 
becoming an efficient citizen. He is able 
to recognize the opposing teams, and he 
1 20 



THE EFFICIENT CITIZEN 

knows the batting record of the men on 
each side. At present, one great idea is 
fighting for its Hfe in America. The 
great question before us is whether the 
repubHc is to be a democracy. Are the 
people to rule? Can they be trusted? Is 
our life to be built about a great belief 
in the dignity and significance of every 
individual life? 

Any one who looks beneath the surface 
of conditions in America must see that 
many Americans have ceased to believe 
in democracy. Some believe in a benevo- 
lent rule of the many by the capable few. 
Some believe in the lordship of the few 
without any regard for what happens to 
the many. The conception of numbers 
of able people is that America should 
become a great pyramid with the few 
rulers at the apex. The democratic con- 
ception believes that America is a cube 
built solidly of the massed strength of 
its individual lives; and the very hope 
of the country is in the passionate belief 
in democracy. Rome did not believe in 

121 



THE MAN OF POWER 

the people, and worked out a great system 
to control them. Sometimes it was 
benevolent, sometimes it was tyrannical. 
It was not democratic. Not to be another 
Rome, but to be a successful demonstra- 
tion of the idea of democracy, is 
America's mission. The efficient citizen 
must understand democracy and its 
battles with those who would use the 
forms of democracy to defeat its pur- 
poses. 

Then the efficient citizen must under- 
stand Americans. Not only the idea of 
democracy, but the people of the democ- 
racy must be within his ken. Otherwise 
he is a mere visionary, a mere theorist. 
The pattern revealed on the mount is to 
be applied to very human material, and 
this material must be understood by the 
patriot. 

A clever literary man was in the habit 
of complaining that his brightest theories 
were all the while being upset by dis- 
agreeable facts. In such a situation it 
would seem wise to take account of the 

122 



THE EFFICIENT CITIZEN 

facts in forming the theories. Then the 
facts would be aUies, and not foes. 
Americans are the principal facts to be 
dealt with in America. A man like 
O. Henry, with his alert, scrutinizing 
eyes, really knew many Americans in 
defining fashion. The politician who 
controls a precinct usually knows the 
Americans within his precinct. To have 
an actual knowledge of the types of peo- 
ple in America — neither the knowledge 
of a critic nor the knowledge of a man 
seeking people to exploit, but the knowl- 
edge of a friend and a neighbor — is the 
second characteristic of the efficient 
citizen. 

It is easy enough to know the people 
of one's own group. We know the 
things they assume as well as the things 
they say ; we know the passwords and all 
the freemasonry of our own type of 
American men and women, but for all 
that we may be provincial. There are 
many other groups with a different back- 
ground of experience, with different 
123 



THE MAN OF POWER 

hopes and fears, with different ideas and 
ideals, and as long as we cannot in some 
measure see life through their eyes, we 
do not really understand Americans. As 
long as to us an immigrant is only a suit 
of clothes with a foreigner inside, there 
are a million people coming to our shores 
every year of whom we have no sympa- 
thetic comprehension. To read such 
books as Mary Antin's The Promised 
Land, Jacob Riis's The Making of an 
American, or Dr. Grose's Aliens or 
Americans? is to be introduced to vast 
sections of American life in an entirely 
new way. And besides the immigrants, 
the mountain people, all the varieties of 
workers and strugglers in the land, the 
millions of black people working out their 
destiny among us — all of these are to be 
studied, not merely by means of books, 
but through actual contact, until we know 
how to meet all kinds of Americans and 
feel at home among them. 

The third characteristic of an efficient 
citizen is that he knows himself. 
124 



THE EFFICIENT CITIZEN 

Through knowing himself he is to come 
to the most fundamental knowledge of 
other people. 

They are good, they are bad, 

They are weak, they are strong, 
Wise, foolish ... so am I. 

Then why should I sit in the scorner's seat, 
Or hurl the cynic's ban? 

Let me live in my house by the side of the road 
And be a friend to man. 

Our American must study his own life, 
its weakness and its streingth, its limita- 
tions and its powers, and as he comes to 
know himself better he will be able to 
take a new and sympathetic and accurate 
appraisal of all his fellow citizens. It is 
one thing to study citizenship as a collec- 
tion of duties for other men; it is quite 
another to study myself and my duties as 
a citizen. Am I willing to run personal 
risks for the good of the community? 
Am I willing to make sacrifices for the 
sake of reform and civic betterment? Am 
I willing to wear the patriot's shoes when 
they are very uncomfortable for the feet? 
It is only as individual men will ask these 
125 



THE MAN OF POWER 

questions and answer them in the affirma- 
tive that there is any use of talking of 
such a thing as genuine citizenship. The 
man who has studied his own Hfe, has 
fought his own battles with selfishness 
and greed, and has won his own victories, 
is ready to be a leader in the matters of 
practical patriotism. The man who will 
vote for what is good for the country, 
even if it is not personally good for him, 
is a sort of civic saint. 

Now, the man who knows the meaning 
of true Americanism, who knows Ameri- 
cans and knows himself, and is com- 
mitted to the highest views of all of these, 
who, with all his practical insight, judges 
at last by what is possible rather than 
by what is actual — this man is ready to 
live for his country, and living for his 
country will mean getting into the prac- 
tical battle for municipal righteousness, 
for State-wide righteousness, and for 
national righteousness. It will mean to 
true men, alertly refusing to be guided 
by the man who is a reformer for revenue 
126 



THE EFFICIENT CITIZEN 

only, and following to the end of the 
day the man who is fighting for the cause 
of the people and their inalienable rights. 
It will mean that a political party is 
always considered a means to an end, and 
never an end in itself, and that when 
it ceases to serve good ends it will be 
thrown into the brush heap. It will 
mean that the politician is to be made 
and kept servant of the people, and never 
their master. The people are not to do 
the will of the politicians. The politicians 
are to do the will of the people. To be 
an efficient citizen will involve battles 
against unsanitary conditions imtil the 
last plague spot in America is removed; 
it will involve battles against conditions 
of labor which ruin the health of the 
laborer until the last factory has been 
made a healthful and wholesome place; 
it will involve a ceaseless vigilance in 
fighting the forces of the saloon, which 
gather about themselves all the poisonous 
and dangerous elements in American 
life; it will mean a constant watchfulness 
127 



THE MAN OF POWER 

of all great organizations of capital and 
labor and, whenever necessary, such a 
regulation of their activities as shall keep 
them from becoming instruments of 
oppression. The nation must control 
everything which is a part of its life in 
the name of righteousness. 

By study, by practical work, by con- 
stant alertness, our citizen will keep in- 
formed and personally related to the 
movements which make for the better- 
ment of American life. He will feel the 
breadth of the new patriotism as it stirs 
through the life of the nation. He will 
rejoice in it, and he will give himself to it. 

The efficient citizen will receive his last 
power as an American from the fact that 
he is a Christian. The righteousness for 
which he battles as a patriot is the right- 
eousness he desires as a servant of Christ. 
The selfishness and greed with which he 
battles as a citizen are the great foes of 
the Christian religion. When he enters 
the arena as a patriot he is also doing 
battle for the kingdom of God. 
128 



XII 

COMPLETE EFFICIENCY 

Sam Walter Foss once wrote some 
joyous and swinging lines calculated to 
minister in a peculiar way to human com- 
placency. 

O, we know that 'twixt here and Australia 

Are promiscuous souls not a few, 
But none who is more of a failure, 

And none who is better than you. 
And we know that 'twixt here and New Guinea 

Are various men, low and high, 
But none who is more of a ninny 

Or more of a wonder than I. 

So I mix with the good men and bad men^ 

Who are much the same fellows as I, 
And I find they are glad men and sad men. 

But men it is good to get nigh. 
Let me cry when there's no help for crying. 

And dance when the dancers spin. 
And join in the selling and buying, 

And laugh where the laugh comes in. 

There is a vim and robustness and a 
hearty and good-natured comradeship in 
129 



THE MAN OF POWER 

these lines which at once makes its ap- 
peal. And it is surely true that all kinds 
of men are well worth knowing, but it 
is not true that all kinds of men can be 
shaken together as just about equal 
morally or in any other way. Different 
men live in different moral worlds, and 
different intellectual worlds, and different 
social worlds, and different spiritual 
worlds. The real brother of men does 
not reduce them all to a dead level. He 
tries to get every man he can reach to 
live in the best possible world by becom- 
ing the best possible man. Not by talking 
down the man who is up, but by talking 
up the man who is down, do we help the 
world. 

In the chapters of this book the 
endeavor has been to discuss with such 
lucidity as was possible those principles 
and practices which go to make an effi- 
cient man and an efficient Christian. In 
the nature of the case such discussion 
must be suggestive rather than dogmatic. 
It must try to stimulate rather than to 
130 



COMPLETE EFFICIENCY 

give a set of rules. If by committing 
and observing rules men could become 
efficient, there would be very few failures. 
But the spirit and the personal equation 
make all the difference in the world, and 
for them you cannot prescribe. 

Now that in this final chapter we at- 
tempt to view the subject in the large, 
it is still more true that our attempt must 
be to capture a spirit and suggest an at- 
mosphere rather than to prescribe a 
course of treatment, and, for that matter, 
the real capturing must be done by the 
reader. To change the figure, we may 
call out, "Come on in, the water's fine." 
He must leap into the stream. It is as 
a man breasts the current and strikes out 
for himself that the secrets of efficiency 
become clear to him. 

Certain general characteristics of the 
largest efficiency, however, will have this 
advantage, as we talk about them. They 
will be obvious as soon as we mention 
them. This does not lessen their impor- 
tance, for it is by ignoring the obvious 

131 



THE MAN OF POWER 

that most people fail. The story of the 
lady from Philadelphia who was of the 
utmost value to her friends by telling 
them obvious things is a pertinent illus- 
tration. 

The first essential to complete efficiency 
is to have a large and adequate view of 
life itself. We may not measure up to 
our ideas of fife's meaning, but, on the 
other hand, we are fairly sure not to go 
beyond them. The varieties of new 
thought and other forms of self -hypno- 
tism through the mind and the imagina- 
tion, have produced a sufficiently large 
crop of intellectual and other wild oats, 
but they do have this true thing to say: 
a man's thought about life does influence 
his life itself. To be a doer of the Word 
a man must have a word to do, and a 
word is a thought made articulate. 
"How do you think about life?" is a 
most fundamental and penetrating ques- 
tion. 

Ha man's view of life is built about 
the mastering thought of a righteous, 
132 



COMPLETE EFFICIENCY 

loving God who has revealed himself and 
rescued humanity in the great sacrifice 
of the Divine Son, all sorts of secrets 
of efficiency lurk in this view held firmly 
in the mind. The world is largely made 
for a particular man by how he thinks 
of it, and the man who begins by having 
a good God ends by having a world it is 
good to live in. A man may be; tremen- 
dously efficient if he has a good God, 
though he is in the midst of bad men, 
but a man with a bad God, or no God 
at all, has the sources of efficiency sapped 
in his life. 

The next thing which makes for the 
largest efficiency is that a man's view of 
life shall have been made a commanding 
and controlling thing in his own experi- 
ence. All that he believes must become 
bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh. 
Calvary must cease to be something on 
a green hill far away and become some- 
thing in a man's own heart. The per- 
sonal appropriation of the truths of the 
Christian faith by a fine magic changes 
133 



THE MAN OF POWER 

them from abstractions of the mind into 
actual experiences of the soul. They 
become the kindling and creative forces 
of the life. Christ in you is the hope 
of efficiency as well as the hope of glory. 
The next necessity for the largest effi- 
ciency is the possession of an adequate 
instrument with which to work upon the 
world. The instrument, of course, is the 
body; and the better body a man has the 
more efficient he may become. It is quite 
true that an enormous amount of work of 
the world has been done by the invalids of 
the world. It is true that both Charles 
Darwin and Herbert Spencer are illustra- 
tions of what may be done in spite of 
grave physical limitations. All this is 
encouraging to those who must do the 
best they may in spite of handicaps, but 
it is no reason why the rest of the world 
should seek handicaps. Herbert Spencer 
did not find it easier to construct the 
synthetic philosophy because of his long 
battle with sleeplessness. Other things 
being equal, a philosopher will do better 
134 



COMPLETE EFFICIENCY 

work if he sleeps well. The efficient body 
is the servant of the efficient mind. The 
old day at Oxford when the pale, almost 
emaciated, face of intellectual distinction 
and physical weakness was the face most 
admired has passed away in this day, 
when athletics has put a crown on the 
brow of the physically fit. All this is 
immensely wholesome, providing a man 
sees to it that however efficient his body 
is, his brain shall be even more efficient. 
The keeping of the physical instrument 
of life and labor in the best possible 
condition is one of the important ele- 
ments in the securing of the largest 
power for a man's life. 

With a commanding vision of the 
meaning of life, and a personal appro- 
priation of the great truths of life and 
religion, and a body fit and stinging with 
eager energy, a man is ready to go forth 
to his work. Now his greatest efficiency 
will be secured through right methods 
of activity. He may waste his resources 
or he may use them; he may husband 

135 



THE MAN OF POWER 

his strength for the strategic endeavors 
or he may heedlessly scatter it in a multi- 
tude of small tasks. In that charming 
volume of brief essays, Along the Road, 
Mr. Arthur Christopher Benson says : *'I 
have often mistrusted the old proverb 
about looking after the pence and letting 
the pounds take care of themselves. That 
generally seems to me to result in great 
discomfort and little accumulation. Much 
more substantial fortunes are made by 
looking after the pounds and not fretting 
over the pence." Of course, details are 
often important, but if one may be par- 
doned the seeming redundancy, that is 
only when they are important details. 
The laboratory of experience is the place 
where we all must learn efficiency in 
methods. Some can learn more than 
others from the experience of the past, 
but it comes at last to trying it out on 
the; field of personal experience, of never 
making the same mistake twice, and being 
the first to profit by our own failures. 
The man who thus learns how to use his 
136 



COMPLETE EFFICIENCY 

energies, how to invest his resources, will 
become the most powerful and effective 
man. 

Last of all, though in a sense included 
in what we have already said, the man 
of complete efficiency must have an effi- 
cient God. Life is so big and mysterious, 
it reaches beyond our thought and ex- 
perience in such an amazing fashion, that 
only the sense of being coworkers with 
the One who understands the whole vast 
mechanism, and keeps it going can bring 
us to our best. In Emerson's powerful 
*^Essay on Montaigne," which one would 
scarcely pick up for a text on efficiency, 
there occurs this discerning sentence: 
"We are here not to work, but to be 
worked upon." The truth at the heart 
of this utterance the busy worker must 
come to recognize. It is the sense of 
divine energizing and support and in- 
spiration which will produce the most 
powerful man. Not nervous bustling 
self-sufficiency, but a constant and noble 
dependence upon the divine support will 

137 



THE MAN OF POWER 

produce the largest results in human ac- 
tivity. This is why the Calvinists have 
made such workers and fighters and 
thinkers. The sovereignty of God is un- 
equaled as a producer of efficiency in 
man. 

The possession not only of an efficient 
God, but of God's idea of efficiency, will 
change and uplift all our standards. The 
difference between the swift commercial 
standards and the patient divine stand- 
ards seems largely to lie in the fact that 
the latfer make room for sacrifice and 
seeming failure, and out of those bring 
ultimate success. The most efficient in- 
fluence in the history of the world was 
a public execution where a Man gave 
up his life. We must not fail to give the 
cross a place in our ultimate estimate of 
efficiency. 

The men of the cross in every age may 
be more efficient than we know. The 
struggling preacher leading a forlorn 
hope, the physician ministering to the 
needs of an obscure and tiny village, the 
138 



COMPLETE EFFICIENCY 

men the nation over doing quiet work 
faithfully, the men who have given up 
personal ambitions for the sake of others, 
and all the company of those who have 
tasted the bitterness and the glory of self- 
sacrifice, have their own place in the 
armies of the efficient. Losing their 
lives, they shall find them again. They 
keep the spirit of Calvary alive in the 
world, and, on the whole, that is the 
greatest service which can be rendered 
to any age. 

The final Christian efficiency of the 
world is secured through the activity of 
a God who out of all that is fragmentary 
and ineffective builds up a total of unsus- 
pected power. He is the great worker 
and we are to work with Him. The best 
of body and mind, of heart and will, are 
to be brought to the tasks which are 
God's tasks in the world. The best is 
none too good. A man is to seek ear- 
nestly the largest and fullest equipment 
and life for the service of God. If he 
has limitations he cannot surmount, he 
139 



THE MAN OF POWER 

may remember the efficiency of the cross 
and with new courage approach his tasks. 
In the last analysis, God's completeness 
of character and power is the hope of 
the efficiency of the world. 



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